


come take my pulse

by nicheinhischest



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M, zombie apocalypse AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-12 07:51:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 38,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1183765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicheinhischest/pseuds/nicheinhischest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Everything’s always better when the sun comes up," Niall says, idly drawing a Z on Zayn’s elbow. Or an N. It’s hard to tell. “Sorta funny, when you think about it - whole world’s fucking dead, but the sun still rises and sets like nothing’s changed. The predictability is nice.”</p><p>Zayn sighs and tells him tiredly, “Y'know, you say eerily cheerful things for someone who bashed a zombie’s face in with a golf club today."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (Annnd I got in just under the wire! [It's still the 13th here in CST, hah.] Also please never let me do a Big Bang ever again, I am not good under pressure.) **Archive warning is for blood & guts, lots of off screen/past character deaths, mention of zombie-related cannibalism (no, the boys don't eat anyone, I promise). Title is from [Metric's "Help I'm Alive"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoK63Bk7pgw).** 
> 
> Here is a [link to some wonderful art](http://accidentalziam.tumblr.com/post/76575084597/all-quotes-taken-from-come-take-my-pulse-by) by accidentalziam. When I found out they were going to be asofterworld influenced comics, I actually clapped like a seal ( _seriously_ ) because it's the perfect sort of vibe for this fic imo. There's a couple embedded here throughout, but PLEASE go check out the rest and leave messages about how wonderful it all is!!! Thank you so much Nikki!
> 
> Special thanks to Moosk, who is literally the only reason this is even readable and who also pushes me to write better constantly, [Bee](http://archiveofourown.org/users/khakis), for 5am writing/wine drinking sessions, and [Lindsay](http://archiveofourown.org/users/icecreamsocialist), for egging me on after 1D Day when I was like 'ha ha, a cracky zombie apocalypse au would be hilarious!!!!!' and then egging me on _even more_ when it went in a decidedly Not Funny direction. AND! Thanks to every person who listened to me talk (read: whine) about this for the past three months and encouraged me to finish when I thought I couldn't; your cheerleading did more than you know!

The glare of the mid-afternoon sun is blinding.

Zayn shades his eyes with a grimy hand as he stares into the distance; he can see the Sears Tower from here, massive and menacing, still standing even with its blown-out windows and empty rooms. He's having one of those days where he overdoses on nostalgia, stuck somewhere in early 2013, newly twenty and bored out of his mind in an undergrad lecture at Columbia College, leaning back in his seat just enough to see the sun set to the west of him. 

Newly twenty, and still hopeful that his major would actually manage to be of some use to him - or well, alright, so a BFA in Illustration didn't exactly guarantee a lifetime of success, but Zayn was _talented_ and he had lucked out with an amazing internship at an ad agency, as well as a weird-but-fiercely-loyal roommate and a relationship with a pretty girl with bright blue eyes. 

That was before everything went to shit, obviously. Before Chicago turned into a vacant city thanks to the widespread destruction of an unknown, ruthless virus that, up until that point, had only existed in the realm of horror movies.

Before civilization collapsed in on itself. 

He's only got one thing left to call his own, most days; because the ad agency shut down when they realized the outbreak couldn't be contained and was spreading inland from the east coast at breakneck speed, because Zayn’d naïvely let the pretty girl with bright blue eyes into his and Lou’s barricaded apartment in the middle of summer a few months after that, only to have her attempt to eat his face for breakfast.

(She'd shown up at their door the night before, alone and afraid and so, so pale, and they let her in without a second thought because it'd been comforting to see a familiar face again. They didn’t even notice the bite on her ankle until Louis was moving her body outside while Zayn tried fruitlessly to scrub bloodstains off the sofa.

She was Louis' first kill. _You have to destroy the brain_ , the news reports had said, so he took a frying pan off the stove and swung away. He wasn't that happy about it. Neither was Zayn, really - his sort-of-girlfriend had tried to bite him, and not even in a sexy way.

It wasn’t the first lesson they learned in the new world, but it’s always been the most important: check for bite marks, no matter what you’ve been told. Even if the end result means certain death.)

A bead of sweat trickles down Zayn's back as he lazily rocks in place on his skateboard, chin tipped upward. The skateboard itself is a remnant of Before, beat up but intact, the underside of the deck spray painted a dozen times over and covered in dirty, peeling stickers; on the nose is a section of grip tape with the Misfits’ logo across it and a tiny _ant/dan_ etched under one skeletal eye socket with an X-Acto knife, years ago. 

It’s 2015, and he's in the middle of a deserted intersection watching the sun beat down in waves, completely out in the open - _easy target_ , Louis’d tsk, if he weren’t currently raiding the drugstore two blocks down. Late summer, maybe, if the slow-fading heat and long days are any indication. Anyone with the means to do so left for good a year and a half ago, back when the Midwest was finally thrown into the mass hysteria of a rapidly westward moving virus, and Chicago was left overrun and crushed beneath the weight of the undead. The humans that stayed - like Zayn, like Louis - learned to spread out and hide amongst its neighborhoods in an effort to avoid becoming finger food.

It's 2015, and the world's been dead for two years.

At least the whole zombie apocalypse thing means Zayn won't have to pay his student loans back - and it helps, sometimes, to think of the positives. Like how most of the flesheaters have vanished to bumblefuck towns to the west, which means he and Louis get to raid whatever buildings they want, which means they can _kick push coast_ their boards through abandoned cars and cabs and messenger bikes littering the streets, _which means_ Zayn can stand in the middle of an intersection and think about what his life was like Before without worrying about landing in the hospital via hit and run - 

Something takes in a rattling breath behind him, and Zayn tenses -

He doesn’t have to worry about hospitals, no, but he _does_ have to watch out for horrific creatures with a habit of chewing through skin and bone.

He looks over his shoulder slowly - they don't react well to sudden movement, are about as calm as a dog that's gone mad with rabies - and lowers his well worn Docs to the street carefully, board resting between his feet.

He knows who the zombie is, this time around. He doesn’t usually, but this one, this one was his professor for a Digital Animation Techniques course. One of the last he'd gone to before the outbreak hit. Cowell, his name was. Gave Zayn an A and told him to utilize his potential. 

Zayn really doesn't want to decapitate an old professor.

(He will, though he doesn't want to - he never _wants_ to, but he can't afford to weigh the moral implications of being forced to kill people whose faces are sometimes so painfully familiar. Not when it's the difference between life and death.)

Cowell's ten yards away, maybe less, swaying in between two abandoned, rusted taxi cabs. He's only just started to decompose, which is alarming for two reasons: it means he'll be strong, and it means something _else_ bit him recently.

Maybe Chicago isn't as much of a ghost town as they thought.

Cowell's drooling, shoulders hunched forward and fingers gnarled into claws at his side. He's got the typical undead chic look down pat: sunken, dark eyes, lips cracked and crusted with blood, skin peeling off him as if afraid of the body it's meant to cover. There's dried guts down the front of his shirt. Fresh.

Zayn kicks his skateboard up into his hand and runs.

(Runs _away_ from where Louis' still rummaging around a Walgreens, because the apocalypse has turned loved ones into martyrs, and if Zayn's going to die today, he'll be the only one.)

Cowell chases after him; zombies aren't preternaturally fast, which is what Zayn expected after one too many viewings of _28 Days Later_ , but once they lock on a suddenly moving target they get relentless about trapping it. They've a bit of speed to them then, like a mid-level track and field runner, quick enough to catch you if you don't have good lungs and a bit of luck on your side.

Zayn races through another deserted, decrepit intersection, gripping his skateboard tight with one hand, speeds down the city block past rank, overflowing trash piles and the bones of beings already long dead. He vaults over a crushed mailbox, ducks under a bent traffic pole, zig zags across the streets in an attempt to disorient. He can hear Cowell behind him still, not at his heels but close enough for Zayn to grit his teeth and run through the stitch starting to work its way into his side.

Which is, of course, when his foot catches on an old, rotting one-story-high pile of trash bags and he stumbles forward a few feet only to fall and hit the sidewalk hard. His left knee bangs against the concrete, and he winces as the underside of his right forearm scrapes across a broken glass bottle on the ground and tears into his skin.

Zombies get a little fiendish when blood's involved.

Zayn rolls over just in time to see Cowell launch at him, doesn't spare the sizeable wound on his arm a second thought before he grips his skateboard with both hands and swings it as hard as he can.

It catches Cowell in the side, but it's not enough to slow him down, especially since Zayn's broadcasting his blood type like a sample platter at a buffet. Zayn tries to push himself up, but Cowell lunges again - gets Zayn's boot to his chest for his trouble, and Zayn grimaces at brittle rib bones cracking, but the fucker won't give up.

"Fuckin' - undead shithead - " Zayn scrambles for a grip on his skateboard, shoves it at Cowell's throat to keep him at bay as he snaps his teeth at Zayn. " _C’mon_ \- !" he pushes, but Cowell's pupils are blown wide on a high he’s never coming down from.

His gaze is locked on Zayn's forearm, where the blood is spilling out in a sickeningly thick way. Zayn's already getting lightheaded.

His chest heaves with a rough inhale and he shoves again with all his might and an elongated war cry, manages to make Cowell stagger backwards and into the pile of garbage Zayn tripped over; it's a long enough distraction for Zayn to get to his feet, but he barely has time to take a dizzy step back before Cowell's up again.

Zayn's stomach flips, and his eyesight goes double for one horrifying breath, just before his traitorous brain tells him _This is it, then_. He gives himself a precious moment for his mom and dad and sisters, back home in the city he left years ago to come here for school, status unknown. Sends out a mental sorry to Louis, and hopes he doesn't hate Zayn too much for leaving him.

Not that he'll go down without a fight.

"C'mon," Zayn says again, breathless and faint, forearm dripping blood down his arm and onto the pavement. Cowell's jaw is coming apart at the hinge, lips peeling away from his maw. 

Zayn's not going to turn into a monster.

"Come at me," he raises his board again as Cowell takes an unsteady step closer. Then, sardonic and goading, " _Bite me_ , you freak - !"

A growl rips from Cowell's throat, and he jerks towards Zayn, mouth wide and salivating.

That's when Zayn sees the golf club.

It whips into view from behind the zombie, catches him in the temple with a sickening crunch, and Cowell falls against the brick wall of the building to Zayn’s right. Zayn sags against the wall too, injured arm pulled up to his chest, and he watches a guy in a backwards snapback walk a half circle around Cowell so he’s in front of Zayn. He swings the golf club again, first like a baseball bat, and then when that forces Cowell onto the ground, straight down over his skull like a sledgehammer.

Cowell's nose caves on the third downswing; he finally stops breathing on the fifth.

(It's 2015, and Zayn still flinches at the sound of bones breaking.)

" - okay?"

Zayn looks up from the brain mush spilling onto the pavement that used to be his professor's head and blinks blearily. The guy holding the golf club is wearing a ratty tank top with the American flag on it and a holster rig strapped tight to his chest. Zayn can't tell the difference in reds between the stripes on his shirt and the blood splatter.

It'd probably be a lot more poetic if he wasn't too busy trying not to faint. 

" _You okay_?" 

Zayn pushes off the building, stumbles -

And comes face to face with a gun.

He blinks down the barrel, and then at the guy. He looks too nice to have a gun. 

(Now, Louis with a gun - sort of scary. Louis says it's because he's naturally intimidating; Zayn thinks it's mostly because Louis' got pointy teeth that make his smiles look cruel when he's got a Smith & Wesson in his grip.)

"What?" he asks, dazed, and the guy spits out, "Your fucking arm, man."

Zayn looks down; his forearm was covered when he'd been cradling it to his chest, but it's exposed again, oozing blood down his fingers and splattering the sidewalk. The wound's opened more in the fight, a four inch cut with bits of dirt and gravel in it, and he sighs. It's definitely going to get infected if he doesn't treat it.

"Oh. Glass. I got," he blinks once more, slow and unfocused, before studying the sidewalk until he finds what he's looking for: a jagged, broken bottle with fresh blood on it. Zayn nods at it. “Tripped. Bottle broke my fall."

"Show me," comes the demand, and he has a gun pointed at Zayn, so Zayn sticks his arm out. He grabs Zayn’s wrist with his free hand, turns Zayn's arm this way and that and - and fuck, yeah, that hurts, despite the apparent adrenaline rush that comes from _not dying_. He pats Zayn down next, tugs the collar of Zayn’s loose crew neck to check for bites along his collarbone and shoulders, his other arm, lifts his shirt to inspect his back and hips and stomach; crouches and runs his hand up Zayn's calves, shoves up at the basketball shorts Zayn's got on to give his thighs a onceover. 

Zayn braces himself with the back of his wounded forearm resting on the guy’s shoulder and lets him; it’s become a necessity with strangers, with anyone really, because the virus might not be passed through blood and gore, but a single bite is lethal. He just wishes the guy'd hurry up, bile's starting to bubble in his stomach.

When he finally stands, he's got Zayn’s blood on his bare shoulder; droplets of dark red trickle along his arm, but he doesn't make a move to wipe them away. "You look like you're gonna puke."

"Probably," murmurs Zayn. "Didn't get bit."

"Just double checking. Figured the 'bite me' was more a last hurrah battle cry, and not a suggestion." He lifts his cap and scratches at his hair before plopping it down with the bill facing forward, this time. "M'Niall." 

He tucks his gun back in the holster, picks the golf club up from where he let it clatter to the ground and wipes bits of brain off its head with a bandana he pulls from his back pocket.

Zayn gives him a weak salute with his good arm. "Zayn. An’ thanks. For -"

"Bashing its fucking head in?" Niall smiles, bright and cheerful. And just a little wicked. "No problem - woah, hey," he catches Zayn under his armpits when Zayn's body gives out on him and he pitches forward. "Okay, you need help."

"Lou's at the store," Zayn slurs, “s'gettin' groceries."

"I'm sure he is, I'm sure he'll be back soon," Niall's pacifying him, clearly assuming Zayn's in shock and talking about someone who isn't even alive anymore. He takes out another bandana, this one significantly cleaner, and wraps it tight around Zayn's forearm to try and stem the blood loss. 

It doesn't really work.

Right before Zayn passes out, he thinks Niall mutters, "Liam's gonna kill me."

*

When Zayn drifts back into consciousness, it's to the sound of people arguing:

" - Niall, you can't be serious -"

"I don't even see what the big deal is - we've got plenty of room, he woulda fucking bled out in the street otherwise -"

Someone lets out an exasperated breath. "We can't just -"

"What're you gonna do, Liam? Throw him out? You helped me bring him here, and you're just gonna kick him right back out?"

" _No_." Big sigh. Zayn's brow furrows. "Of course not, I wouldn’t - we just. We don't know anything about him besides his name -"

"Think he's up," a third voice says, and Zayn sighs. He's on something incredibly soft, and there's a dull ache in his right arm when he rolls onto it; a hand goes to his chest and pushes him onto his back again.

"Probably shouldn't lie on that." 

Zayn blinks his eyes open slow, is met with Niall crouched down in front of him, and two people he hasn’t seen yet. One is standing at Niall's shoulder, frowning down at Zayn with his arms crossed and brow furrowed, while the other is sitting on a plush chair, chin resting on the knee pulled up to his chest. Dozens of candles surround them, placed strategically to achieve the most light, and the flames flicker across their faces in the oddest way as Zayn looks at them.

"Where'm I?" he asks. It’s dark, and he can’t make out much, but he’s lying in a bed, and the dusty, ornate curtains hanging across the windows and innocuously monochromatic color scheme makes him think he might be in a hotel room.

Niall smiles. "The Drake."

( _Fancy_ hotel room, then.)

Zayn tries to sit up, sways a little when he does, and Niall shifts quickly, sits on the edge of the bed and holds him steady with a warm hand on his back. "Tuck your head between your legs," he suggests, and Zayn nods, but keeps his eyes focused on the frowny guy instead.

Frowny guy drops his arms and sighs despairingly before he settles on concern and says softly, "I'll get you something for the pain."

"Don't worry about Liam," Niall says, once he’s gone. "Got the big brother role down perfectly now, really into rules. Keep telling him y'can't have order bred in chaos, but he never listens."

"I can hear you," Liam's disembodied voice says, and Niall laughs lightly and rises.

"Damage control," he says to Zayn, jerking a thumb behind him. "Gotta go cuddle him until he decides us bringing you here was a good idea. Harry'll keep you company."

The one in the chair lifts a hand. Niall disappears, and Zayn pinches the bridge of his nose, rubs at his eyes. He looks down - the front of his shirt is soaked in blood, but his arm is mostly clean and its wound bandaged. "You brought me all the way to the Drake?"

"Liam and Niall did. I would've helped, but I was holding down the fort." He half smiles. "Holding down the two-hundred-and-fifty-thread-count Egyptian bedding, as it were."

He glances over his shoulder at wherever Niall and Liam have disappeared off to before looking at Zayn. "We don't normally take in strays. Dunno who to trust, and we've only got so many limited resources. But you seem nice enough, and Niall’s gut instinct is usually spot on. What were you doing in the Loop by yourself, anyway? It's been quiet for awhile, but still."

Zayn shakes his head. "I wasn't -" his eyes widen, "I _wasn’t_ , fuck, I need to -"

He flips the covers off, lifts his arm to his chest when he gets up and swallows down a wave of nausea in the process. The arm's bandaged correctly, but it’s nothing like how Lou'd do it - and he stumbles out of bed, rushing forward as he babbles, "Louis, Louis, he was ransacking a drugstore looking for food, I have to -"

Harry's in front of him in an instant, somehow, palms curling over his shoulders. "Hey, you should - you should relax, you've had a rough -"

"You don't understand," he's panicking, can't take a breath in, can’t bear the thought of Louis yelling himself fucking hoarse searching for Zayn, and his eyes sting when Harry asks hesitantly,

"Your friend... Niall said you were probably just drifting out of consciousness, but you were actually with someone?"

" _Yes_ ," Zayn says, and scrubs a hand through his hair. "Fuck!"

He tries to push past Harry, but Harry stands his ground, holding Zayn in place; footsteps pound down the hotel halls and Niall and Liam come to a halt at the door.

"The hell's going on?" Niall says, passing through the door and stopping just short of the bed. "Why are you yelling?"

"His friend," Harry says, eyes locked on Zayn still. "His friend's out there."

"Shit," says Liam, and Zayn takes a pleading step forward, shoulder knocking into Harry's chest. 

"I need to go, I need to - I need to find him, and tell him I'm okay -"

"It's dark out." Harry's mouth is at his ear, bear hugging Zayn around his biceps so his arms are pinned to his sides. "You can't go. Look, you _can’t_ ," he grunts and heaves his weight forward when Zayn tries to shove at him. "You've been knocked out for hours, the sun's already _set_ -"

"You can't tell me what to do," Zayn squirms, hisses when his wounded arm smacks Harry's elbow. He breaks his hold only for Harry yank him back with a fistful of his shirt. "Get the fuck off me or I'll -"

"Kill me?" Harry asks, and twists Zayn's good arm up behind his back, sets his other like a vise around Zayn's neck. Zayn can't move without his shoulder straining to pop out of its socket, and he grits his teeth when Harry adds calmly, "Please don't do anything stupid."

Liam's standing at the doorway, arms crossed and mouth set, barricading Zayn in if need be. They're all a touch too thin these days, born from too little sustenance and too much running, but Liam still manages to look fairly imposing. Zayn shoots him the most threatening look he can muster up, anyway. "You really - you really think you're gonna keep me here? I've taken down monsters bigger than you, _sweetheart_."

Liam shrugs. He looks very sincere. Zayn just scowls harder and ignores the twinge in his shoulder and the pressure against his windpipe from Harry’s hold. 

"You can try," Liam tells him. "It'd practically be suicide to go out now, though, and I wouldn't want you to get hurt just because you can't separate your emotions from the situation at hand."

Thing is - he's right. The people who couldn't take their emotions out of the equation were the first to get bit after the virus crashed over them and worldwide panic set in, after the first group of leading global experts finally said the word _zombie_. They're the ones who were turned because they couldn't kill family or neighbors or _the pretty girl with bright blue eyes_. Liam's right, and Zayn's said the same damn thing to so many people before in the span of two years -

But it's different now that it's actually happening to him.

His sight goes blurry. "You don't under _stand_ ," he says again, and a broken laugh rips out of his chest as he sags, back against Harry's chest, the fight gone out of him in one hopeless moment. Harry begins to release him slowly. "He's all I have left. He's all I have. Do you get that?"

Liam smiles close mouthed at him. "Have you looked around lately? The world's in ruins, I'm pretty sure we all _get that_." He sets something down on the dresser closest to him. "Here's the pills, I'm gonna go patrol."

"Don't forget your -"

Liam pats a holster, comes up with a gun and gives it a wave in Niall’s direction. "I know."

He disappears into the hallway, and Harry shifts on the balls of his feet, shoots Niall and Zayn an apologetic look. "I'm gonna... keep him company."

He grabs a golf club propped up by the door before he leaves.

The second he's gone, Zayn heads towards the door again, only to be cut off by Niall; he's got a surprising amount of strength for someone who looks like the most exercise they got pre-zombie apocalypse was a few deep belly laughs a day.

He also cups Zayn's face, thumbs skimming along his jaw, and the movement surprises Zayn enough to catch him off guard and make him stop. 

"Hey."

"Louis," Zayn starts, but Niall shakes his head.

"Can’t," he says, apologetic. "I promise you, I'll help you - we'll help your friend. But the sun isn't coming up for hours, and you know as well as I do that that flesheater was probably bitten recently, and if it was on the streets, there might a dozen more just like it dying for a bit of brains - _hey_. Zayn. Look at me."

Zayn does. Niall gives his head a little shake, palms slipping to his neck. "I will help you find Louis," he enunciates each word carefully. "Okay? You just have to trust me, and wait."

Zayn chokes on the air in his lungs, and he’s got an armful of Niall before he realizes what’s happening; they’re the same height, mostly, but he tucks his head under Zayn’s chin, nose at the jut of Zayn’s collarbone. 

“I promise,” Niall says, and Zayn trembles under the weight of a slow rising sun and believes him.

*

The third time Zayn wakes - groggy and doped up on meds, given to him earlier - it’s to Niall carefully lifting his arm. Zayn makes a soft, pained sound in his throat, and Niall winces and whispers, “Didn’t mean to wake you. Dressing needs to be changed.”

Zayn rubs the sleep out of his eyes, cranes his neck to peer out towards the window - still pitch black outside - and he flexes his good hand, pushes himself carefully up to sit. The hotel room is a double, massive, so there's a bit of distance between the beds. Liam and Harry are asleep on the second bed to the left of Zayn, Harry sprawled across the mattress with his head on Liam's chest, a wrinkle in his forehead that Zayn can see in the flickering candlelight set up around Niall's impromptu work station just before he feels a sharp pinch on his arm and jerks - Niall's peeling away the last of the bloody dressing over mostly even stitches. 

Zayn doesn’t even remember getting them.

“You were out of it,” Niall murmurs when he notices Zayn’s stare. He tosses the dressing into the corner without looking, and then dips a sponge - the generic kind you get at the supermarket - into a bowl of water set on a chair. 

(That's one of the good things, Zayn figures, about setting up shop next to a lake: never-ending supply of water. The rains replenish whatever they take, and all they have to do is light a fire occasionally and boil the liquid - or toss in a few purifying tablets, though those are becoming rarer as the months crawl on - and they're good to go.)

The soaked sponge is tepid when it touches Zayn’s skin, and Niall’s not wearing gloves, but his hands look clean enough. It’s not like Zayn’s got much of a choice. Beggars can’t be choosers, and all that. “It was really bad - did the best I could, but.”

He brushes the sponge down as gently as possible - Zayn winces anyway - pauses to skate the pads of his fingers along the space around the stitched wound. It cuts jagged down the center of Zayn’s inked microphone, and Niall offers him a regretful smile. 

“Fucked up your tat.”

“Yeah, well,” Zayn grits his teeth when the edge of the sponge catches on a stitch. “Rather be breathing than have an arm full of uninterrupted ink.”

“Yeah, plus you’ll have a really cool scar. I’ve got one too,” Niall drops the sponge in the bowl of water and hikes his leg so his foot is resting on a chair rung. The weather’s still warm enough outside that they’re all in minimal clothing and Niall tugs up on a pair of knee-length khakis so the material’s at his lower thigh, shoves down at a knee brace until Zayn can just make out a scar along the skin there. “I’m a badass.”

Zayn does smile at that, reaches out to touch with his left hand. “What happened?”

“Knee injury, pre-zombified world,” Niall says. “Was at my last PT session after the surgery when the first wave of the virus came westward and attacked the southern ‘burbs.” He shakes his head. “A day earlier - fuck, a few hours earlier - and I would’ve been right there in the thick of it.”

Zayn's smile fades. If Niall’s talking about what Zayn thinks he’s talking about, then it’d’ve been right around the time his girlfriend tried to kill him. “Your family?”

Niall licks his lips and looks down, picks up the sponge and goes back to cleaning. “Government had practically disbanded by then - put Obama in some underground bunker, half the White House staff were chewing on each other. It was pure fucking anarchy, so many wannabe cops rushing in with brute force. First sign of an outbreak and they gunned down whole blocks, remember?”

Zayn remembers. Louis isn’t originally from Chicago, either; had moved here from some quiet town in Florida, got assigned as Zayn’s roommate in the dorms, and they never quite managed to cling to other people the way they did each other. Like Zayn, he didn’t have enough money to fly back home when the news stories about a fast-spreading virus in Europe started cropping up - wouldn’t've mattered, anyway, because they shut down the airports and train systems right after that, and the two of them didn’t have a car. And Zayn _remembers_ , alright, like he’d ever fucking forget - remembers the beginning of the end, remembers Lou’s mom saying _Don’t worry, it’ll be fine, stay there_ and Zayn’s dad saying _You’ll be able to come home soon,_ jaan _, you’ll see_ -

Then the first North American outbreak hit along the east coast, and there wasn’t, in all likelihood, a home to go back to anymore.

Niall squeezes the sponge too tight, distracted, and water drips over Zayn’s arm; he drops the sponge back into the bowl and reaches for a tube of ointment instead. “Shit, my bad.”

“It’s fine,” Zayn tells him. 

He doesn’t say _I’m sorry_. No one does, anymore. Sorry doesn’t bring anyone back, and it doesn’t change the way the world keeps on spinning through its own destruction. Feels cheap, almost. But he does offer up a shaky, “My, my board - I got it in Brooklyn. It was a graduation present. Best friends from back home gave it to me.”

“Oh... I would’ve grabbed it,” Niall says, thumb brushing absentmindedly, unknowingly, over the jigsaw piece near the crease of Zayn's elbow as he rubs a careful layer of a clear cream over the wound with his other hand. “If I had known it was important.”

Zayn tightens his jaw at the churning wave of sadness that crashes into him, and Niall doesn’t ask what happened to his friends or his family. Zayn's not sure he'd tell him, either way.

“I’ve got,” Niall’s voice is rough when he speaks again, and he clears his throat, sticks his free hand out with a glob of ointment still on it to show Zayn his watch. “It was just me and my brother, Dad took care of us, I’ve got his - he stopped wearing it, but it’s a watch he got for one of those like, anniversary things at this factory job. Twenty-five years, I think. Only thing I could find when I managed to make it back to - to what was left.” 

Niall twists his wrist, lifts his arm so the watch slides down; it’s a bit big on him, dusty and broken, but he smiles regardless. “I like the reminder.”

Zayn laughs, and it sounds hollow. “Reminder of what? Everything we lost?”

Niall chews on the corner of his lip and grabs the gauze laid out next to the bowl of water, doesn't speak again until Zayn’s arm is carefully wrapped and he picks up a rolled ACE bandage for the next step: 

"It's a reminder that there were people we loved who loved us back. It’s like - we mattered. They mattered. There was - there was something before all of this.”

Zayn can’t look away, focuses on the slope of Niall’s nose when he scrunches it up in concentration. “The world wasn’t perfect back then, either.”

Niall's thumb smooths out a wrinkle in the bandage, blunt nail gliding down Zayn’s wrist, fingers wrapping around to hold his arm steady. A shiver runs up Zayn’s spine. "No," he agrees softly, finally. “But it was something.”

He pins the bandage down with a couple of clasps, wipes his hands off with a cleanish towel next to the bowl and shoots Zayn a thumbs up. Zayn cradles his arm to his chest - the wound's throbbing again - and asks, “Where’d you learn how to do all this stuff, anyway?”

Niall gives him a lopsided smile, disappears for a moment and then comes back and hands Zayn pills and a small plastic cup of lukewarm water. 

“Not as good at it as he is yet, but Liam taught me. He was training to be a paramedic, before," Niall pauses, glances at Zayn and away. “Um - that’s not my story. The pills were from a pharmacy raid a month ago, but the other stuff - well, you know how shit hit the fan here. Hospitals ended up being gold mines, once everyone was gone. We’ve been lucky enough to hold on to most of our supplies.” He waggles his hands. “Ran out of gloves, though."

Zayn snorts. “We - me and Louis, we broke into a pharmacy. Several, actually. What about the guns and holsters?”

“Zombie cops. Didn’t know the difference between a gun and their own asses, anyway, so we took ‘em." He points a finger gun to his temple with his thumb as the trigger, softly mimics a shot going off. "You and your friend got any?”

"A few." Zayn’s lip curls bitterly. “A group tried to pull one over on us a few months ago, thieving assholes.”

Niall starts packing everything up that he'd set on the chair. “What happened to them?”

“Dead. Bitten. Don’t care?” Zayn shrugs. “They tried to kill us and take our supplies, back when we were hiding out in one of the west suburbs, so we took all their shit and left them in the street somewhere. I wasn’t too concerned about their safety afterward.”

“Ah, the moral ambiguity of surviving an apocalypse,” Niall says with a smile that Zayn returns, albeit briefly. 

He’s hesitant now, catches the hem of Niall’s top as he rises with an armful of supplies. “How long 'til sunrise?”

Niall gives the curtains a once-over. "Mm. Few hours, maybe. You should try and get more sleep.”

Zayn shakes his head. “Don’t even know how I managed it the first time."

“You lost a lot of blood - like, a lot. Liam said the only reason you aren't dead is 'cause you didn't hit a main artery," Niall tells him, sets the medical supplies on a dresser next to a broken flat screen. "So I don’t think you can be blamed for it " 

He stifles a yawn now, walks between the beds with a nod to the still-sleeping forms of Liam and Harry. "Night," he says, and then pauses to add, "You can't get out of the hotel. We chain the doors from the inside, and Liam's the only one with keys."

"And if I try to take them?"

Niall smiles - this knowing, wry thing. Not at all apologetic, now. "Then you're just as dead as the fucker that chased you today."

Zayn lies back and sighs. "M'not going anywhere."

"Fi - figured," Niall says, fighting another yawn, and Zayn gets as far as closing his eyes before unease claws up his throat, and he pushes up with his good arm quick, reaches to close his fingers around Niall's wrist.

"Wait," he says, hoarse. "Wait - can you - ? Um, can you like...”

Niall’s stock still between the hotel beds, brows furrowed together bemusedly, until something like understanding settles in his eyes.

(Zayn and Louis don’t _sleep_ together, but they sleep together, right: curled up, a face buried against a chest, or a mouth set at the nape of a neck, because there is no better comfort in this world than a hand in yours telling you to hold on. He especially can’t sleep now, when his arm is an achingly distracting reminder of the Louis-shaped hole in his life.)

“We all just cuddle together, usually,” Niall says with another glance at Liam and Harry, but he pushes a knee onto Zayn’s mattress and crawls forward anyway, looms over him as Zayn lies back down, and it’s hard to make out all of Niall’s features when he’s blocking the moonlight like this. “It's nice to hear their heartbeats, I think. Zombies’ hearts don’t beat. Always thought that was weird; they breathe like us, but their hearts don’t beat.”

“They’re cold,” Zayn says, and Niall settles down next to him on his stomach with a sigh. He buries his face in the second, grotty pillow and his mouth picks up at one end. 

“We’re not.” 

Zayn curls onto his side, cautiously sets his right arm down between them, and Niall scoots closer until the back of Zayn’s hand brushes his chest. He’s wearing a plain shirt now, as opposed to the bloodied American flag tank from earlier, and it’s thin enough that Zayn can feel his heart thumping in his chest. 

Niall touches Zayn’s elbow, taps his fingers there, and Zayn murmurs, “I have to get to Louis.”

"In the daylight. Everything’s always better when the sun comes up," Niall says, idly drawing a Z on Zayn’s elbow. Or an N. It’s hard to tell. 

“Sorta funny, when you think about it - whole world’s fucking dead, but the sun still rises and sets like nothing’s changed. The predictability is nice.”

Zayn sighs and tells him tiredly, “Y'know, you say eerily cheerful things for someone who bashed a zombie’s face in with a golf club today."

Niall laughs like he's holding something in. “Yeah, well, things are what you make of ‘em.”

“What d’you make of this?” Zayn asks, and he’s not sure what he means, exactly: the world at large, Zayn’s current predicament, Niall bringing him here instead of letting him die. 

Niall’s hand hovers over Zayn's forearm; his index finger drags a curve like a smile onto the skull tattoo above the bandage, and he rubs his face into the pillow under his head.

He says, “I’ll let you know.”

*

Dawn breaks a few hours later, and they suit up.

Liam winds the chains around the front entrance, keys around his neck for safe keeping, and they head straight down Michigan Avenue towards the Loop, where Zayn last remembers Louis being. He’d missed this route, yesterday, when Liam and Niall had brought him back to the Drake. Two years later and it’s still surreal to pass the Allerton with its busted, perpetually unlit TIP TOP TAP sign, to walk down the Magnificent Mile and see block after block of boarded up boutiques and high-end shops that Zayn had never bothered to step in Before.

(Zayn’s sometimes got this macabre sort of satisfaction that the world ended the way it did. Race and class don’t mean anything now - and a zombie’s not going to care if your zip code puts you in Streeterville or Back of the Yards.) 

He can just make out the Michigan Avenue bridge tender houses a few blocks ahead when Liam, with a rifle slung across his back, hands him a gun. The wary look on his face is equal parts _I’m still not sure if I can trust you_ and _I don’t want to see you die unnecessarily_ , and Zayn takes the firearm with a certain sense of gratefulness. 

His arm hurts like a motherfucker, pulses under the bandage as a reminder of how weak he is currently - to injure your dominant side is to put a sign on your back that says _Eat me_ , after all - but he figures when push comes to shove, he’ll bear the pain of firing a handgun if it means surviving a little longer.

“Thanks,” he says with a nod, and feels obligated to add, “You know you guys don’t have to come with me, right?”

Ahead of them, Harry gives him an amused look over his shoulder and further hikes up the golf bag he’s got strapped to his back. “Nah, could go for some practice, I think. What’s the course par for today, Niall?”

Niall turns on his heel, holster rig swinging a bit because he hasn’t yet tightened it up properly, and pulls a face at Harry. “Won’t know ‘til we get there, but I sense a double-bogey in your future,” he says. Harry jumps on him as response, pulling him into a headlock.

Liam shakes his head, lips quirked at the ends. Zayn checks the cylinder of the gun with his left hand and asks, “Course par?” 

Niall’s still walking backwards, bowed from Harry’s weight, eyes crinkling and cheek squished where Harry’s mouth is smashed against it in a sloppy kiss. “Fucker’s typically go down in four swings - get _off_ , you oaf, I can’t breathe - !”

Harry beams, spins them around so they’re facing forward again and slings an arm around Niall’s shoulder instead. Liam cracks his knuckles and explains with a good-natured eyeroll in Zayn’s direction, “We broke into a Dick’s Sporting Goods after the snow melted this year. Never seen two people so happy to find golf clubs before.”

“Always wanted to play,” Harry calls over his shoulder to them, and then elbows Niall in the side. “Yeah, Ni?”

"Yeah, had to stick with baseball instead. Think I just like swinging shit around," Niall hip-checks him and tips his head back to grin at Zayn; he adjusts the Bulls snapback he’s got on his head, and Zayn jerks his chin at it.

“Was there a mall by the Dick’s, too?”

“Lids,” Niall laughs, and lifts the snapback like he’s toasting. “Got a whole wardrobe of hats. Hey, we’re gonna go ahead, alright? See what’s around. We'll cross the bridge, wait for you on Wacker?"

“Yeah - hold on,” Liam rushes forward, neatly does up Niall’s rig so it’s snug to his chest; Niall's wearing the same bloodied flag tank as yesterday - _zombie kill uniform_ he’d told Zayn earlier, with a grin and a wink. He smiles sweetly at Liam, whose mouth does a piss poor attempt at hiding his own grin. 

“Thanks, dad,” Niall says, patting his cheek, and Liam mutters, “Shut up,” then knocks him under the chin gently with a crooked finger. Niall grabs hold of a club from Harry’s bag and they set off for the south.

“Be _careful_ , Harry,” Liam yells, when they’re nearly half a city block ahead. Harry turns clumsily mid-jog, golf bag banging against his back, and salutes jauntily. 

“Will do!”

Liam watches them get smaller and smaller until they’re a fair amount of distance apart, eyes squinting and jaw tight; then he does a 180, walks with his back to Zayn’s and adjusts his rifle until he’s got it in his eyeline. They stay like that for a few blocks - Zayn in front, Liam behind - before Zayn asks, “How'd you three meet?”

"Do you really want to play a ‘getting to know you’ game right now?"

"I could ask you what your favorite color is, but I don't think either of us cares about that answer."

Liam snorts derisively; there's a rustling sound of him adjusting his rifle. “Me and Niall have been friends since we were kids. Went to different colleges, but we kept in touch.” He clears his throat. “Only reason we’re still with each other now is because my - um. I was home for the summer, was supposed to go visit him at the hospital and celebrate his final day of physical therapy or whatever -”

“Yeah, he told me,” Zayn looks behind him. “Last night, when he was redoing my bandage."

“Right,” Liam says slowly. “Well, my mom was on shift there, when it happened. The - when the cops started shooting, I mean - or - they weren't even cops, really, just trigger happy idiots. Because mass murder is the answer to everything, apparently.

"Hospital was close to home, so we tried to leave, but someone - I don't know, the nurses' station had the radio on and someone said they were shooting at random, so we just - we hid in the hospital."

Zayn shakes his head and tsks. "How long?"

"A week, maybe? Until we stopped hearing gunshots in the distance." Liam takes a breath and then says, quiet, "They killed his whole family. Both of ours. Did he tell you that? We had to sneak into our old neighborhood - they'd quarantined it, didn't even bother to get rid of the bodies."

" _Fuck_ ," Zayn breathes out, and Liam's voice is tight when he speaks:

"My mom - she was with us for half a year, maybe, after that. It was one of the quiet periods though, when the zombies go into hiding, or die off a bit, or spread out to other states, and we - I just. I let my guard down."

Zayn abruptly doesn't want to hear this story, not when he can guess how it ends, but Liam's forthcoming when he doesn't have to be, and it's the least Zayn can do to listen.

"We were on a food run, routine stuff, and I thought it was okay but I wasn't -” he stumbles, just slightly, over the rubble and his words, “I wasn't paying attention. Didn't see this zombie try and attack some lone kid 'til it was too late, but my mom - she got in a few good whacks, managed to bring it down. Just didn't realize until after it stopped moving that it'd gotten her in the arm."

( _Sorry_ doesn't mean anything these days, but Zayn wishes it had weight right now.)

Liam laughs, soft and shaky. "Buried her in Grant Park. Went to Lolla there with Niall a few years before that, and then had to bury her in the same spot. And you know what's the most messed up part?"

"What?"

"I still don’t know what would've been worse - having her - having her beg me to shoot her so she wouldn't - hurt me," his chest hitches, and he pauses until he sounds stronger. "Or the uncertainty. My sisters and my dad, they all - they were all home. So I knew. But if it wasn't concrete? If I didn't know for certain they were dead, that they weren't roaming around, turning people?"

He doesn't finish, just lets out a breath; Zayn shades a hand against the glare of the sun and says, "New York."

"What?"

"That's where my family is. Was. I don't - Brooklyn was the first borough to fall there."

Liam stops walking behind him. Drops his rifle down so it hangs limply at his side. Zayn keeps on until a palm comes down on his shoulder and forces him to halt, and when he looks, Liam is staring, brow furrowed, mouth set in a frown. 

Zayn asks, "Did you get to say goodbye to her?"

Liam nods.

"Good." Zayn shrugs his hand off and trudges on; Liam lags only for a moment before following. "I'm glad."

And he is. 

Not many people get to say goodbye, these days. It's become a precious, rare commodity - it’s not something he’d ever want to do, but he'd rather say goodbye than have an empty space where a person used to be and no proper way to grieve.

Liam gets a hand on his shoulder again, jerks it back and shifts into view to throw his arms around Zayn in a hug, rifle slung across his back now. Zayn starts, surprised by the contact, and Liam mumbles, "Your friend is gonna be fine." 

The hug only lasts a moment, and Zayn swallows the lump in his throat when they pull away. "I know."

They’re at the start of the bridge, Harry and Niall a few hundred feet away, when Liam presses his fingers down on Zayn's shoulder. 

“Hold on - it's not that I don't trust you. I mean, I have every right not to, honestly," he says. Zayn bows his head in acquiescence and shrugs because, well, fair enough. "Niall's gut instinct is great, swear he’s got a sixth sense, but it's - he and Harry, they have this tendency to find the good in everything. Everyone. They're definitely not naïve, just... they think something right can still come out of all of this."

Zayn lifts his chin. "What do you think?"

Liam kicks at a piece of rubble, and squints down towards the Chicago River in front of them. "I think the world's over, and we're doing the most we can by surviving."

"I'm not looking to hurt him," Zayn says. "Hurt any of you."

"Oh, I know you won't hurt them," Liam says breezily, hauling his rifle up and letting it rest in the dip of his shoulder; his hands tighten around the handle and he smiles. "Because if you did, I'd gut you like a fucking fish."

It's a warning, and a genuine smile breaks across Zayn's features. The ferocity that comes over people who truly want to protect the ones they're with is something he can always appreciate. 

"I think Louis would like you," Zayn muses.

"Yeah?" Liam's tone is hard, but Zayn can hear the underlying, delicate beginnings of companionship in it, too. "Can't wait to meet him."

"And Harry?" Zayn asks then, because he hasn't learned about that connection yet. "How'd he come around?"

"Haven't figured it out yet?" Zayn knits his brows together in response, and the smile Liam gives him is sad and heavy-hearted. "He's, uh - he's the one my mom saved."

His mouth pinches in the next breath, and he inhales sharp and studies his shoes. Zayn gives him a moment, looks up to see where Harry and Niall are instead and -

_Shit._

"Liam," he smacks the back of his hand against Liam's shoulder, ignores the flare of pain in his arm. "Liam -"

He points when Liam looks up, and watches as Liam’s eyes widen; he shouts " _Guys!_ " and darts forward between two deserted cars before Zayn can stop him.

Zayn squints against the harsh morning light, and follows.

*

“So,” Harry whacks at a car with his golf club, dents the hood and gives Niall a sly grin. “Zayn.”

Niall adjusts his cap so his eyes are better shaded, squints into the distance; they’ve gone a dozen long city blocks without seeing a zombie, but he’s not willing to push their luck by not paying attention. “What about him?”

“You tell me."

Niall glances behind him: Liam and Zayn are at the start of the bridge just about, Zayn in front with his gun in his left hand, Liam behind him, rifle raised and focused like the good little soldier he is. He shrugs. 

"He looked our age, didn’t wanna let someone that young die for something that stupid.”

“Mhm,” Harry says, disbelieving, and Niall swings the golf club, gently catches him in the stomach. Harry doubles over for a moment, laughing, and adds, “So the taking him to the hotel thing, that was just you doing your part to ensure the human population doesn’t completely die out?"

“Yep,” Niall says, mouth popping on the ‘p’. Harry just _mmhmms_ again, and Niall snorts. 

“Fuck off, Styles. Say what you mean to say.”

“Nothin’,” Harry smiles wide in his periphery, pushes the hair out of his eyes with an impatient huff as they near the end of the bridge. They’ll all need a cut again soon, Niall’ll have to remind Liam when they aren’t on a rescue mission. “You think he’ll come back with us if we find his friend?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you want him to?”

“Jesus, can’t I rescue someone without you making a big fucking deal about it?” Niall tells him, without any real heat - he’s amused, mostly - and Harry opens his mouth to retort when a zombie suddenly staggers out between broken down buildings a hundred yards ahead.

Harry hisses excitedly through his teeth and says, “What d’you think? Wedge?”

“Nah, nine-iron.” Niall grabs the club from out of Harry's bag, hands it over. He still has a driver in his own grip, and he lets out an impatient huff, lazily twirls the club as the zombie comes into view. 

(They’re always so _slow_ when there’s no blood around to send them into a frenzy, and it’s never any fun. Niall's stuck in a world filled with undead fuckheads. He’s got some serious steam to blow off, here.)

“Just saying,” Harry takes a few cautious steps forward. “He’s like, whatever. Cool. Going out again when he’s hurt just to save his friend.”

The zombie’s noticed them, finally, and starts an unsteady shuffle their way, gurgling as blackened, crusted blood drips out of its mouth. It’s new, like the one Niall smashed yesterday, skin in the beginning stages of decomposition. Hardly peeling at all. 

Niall always likes a challenge.

“Broody, too,” Harry notes, head tilted as the zombie comes closer. "But not like _Angel_ broody, y'know? More like - _My So-Called Life_ , Jordan Catalano broody." Niall lowers his driver and stares. "What, Gemma was obsessed with him, shut up!"

Niall shakes his head, gets into a batting stance - the zombie's only a couple yards away now. “S’the end of the world, Harry,” he says. “Everyone’s broody.”

"Yeah," Harry agrees. And: "Wrong sport."

"I'm bored," Niall answers, and checks behind them once more. Zayn’s pointing in their direction now, saying something to Liam, who immediately breaks into a run, dodging between long-emptied cars and over cracks in the pavement under his feet. "I have to put all those years of Little League baseball to some use."

"Guys!"

That's Liam. Niall already knows what he's going to say - _wait for me, let's do this together, it's safer_ \- he's _barely_ older than them, but it's like he's hard-wired to treat Niall and Harry like he's their big brother, says it's because he never got to be one until now.

Niall ignores the warning and calls out, "We've got this, Lemo!" 

Harry sidesteps the zombie with a wide berth, his own club held out in front of him like a sword. The zombie shuffles between them, disoriented over who to attack.

Harry murmurs, "Batter up, Horan," and Niall jabs the end of his club into the zombie's side to get its attention. It lurches, recovers, and just as it lunges at him, mouth open and teeth bared, Niall takes his swing.

The head of the golf club slams into the zombie's cheek with a satisfying crunch and breaks it; the zombie stumbles to the side and onto a knee, pushes up slow, and Niall watches the bottom hinge of its jaw dangle obscenely. It dives forward again - only to fall to the ground when Harry smashes his iron club into its neck from behind.

It struggles to rise against the battered road and Harry kicks it onto its side, steps on the head once its down for the count, shoe over its ear, hard enough to keep it steady even as it continues to thrash and fight. He looks at Niall expectantly. 

"Par four?" he asks, manic grin in place, and Niall painstakingly lines his shot up, driver set under the zombie's nose. Gotta get the angle just right, or the bone won't shift up into its brain.

"Nah." Niall grips the golf club tight on his upswing and smiles. This is his favorite part. "Par three."

He follows through: blood splatters on their legs, and Harry’s resulting bark of laughter echoes in the street.

Liam reaches them as Niall's shaking Harry's hand for a job well done when another growl sounds from the same area the zombie had stumbled out of a few minutes before. Harry whips around, and they all three watch as the second zombie staggers into the street, slow-moving and groaning and new, followed closely by a man - mid-twenties, maybe, with ratty hair and an even scragglier beard.

There’s a fire in his eyes, a fierce flash of merciless anger that makes the hair on the nape of Niall's neck stand up - the people who've got nothing left to lose are sometimes more dangerous than the zombies themselves - and he takes hold of the skateboard in his hands and whips it to the side; it catches the zombie in the neck, and the bone snaps. The zombie falls to the ground, unmoving, and the man steps over its torso, pulls a gun from the waistband of his jeans and aims down between its eyes.

That’s when Zayn shouts - an anguished, cracking _oh God, Lou?_ \- and the man’s head snaps up, eyes wide. The skateboard in his free hand drops - 

The skateboard. 

Niall should’ve figured. 

He turns in time to see Zayn sprint down the length of the bridge and into the intersection, past Niall and Harry and Liam, stops a few feet short of Louis, breathing hard. When the zombie moans a death rattle, Louis shoots it in the head without looking away from Zayn, like he's afraid to lose sight of him again. Louis' eyes flick down to Zayn’s bandaged arm, the bloodied front of his shirt, and then back up, and as Zayn finally moves forward, Louis presses the back of the hand holding his gun against his mouth.

His face crumples, and he lets out a gasp when Zayn finally reaches him. He yanks Louis into a hug, arm injury be damned, and Louis twists Zayn’s shirt in his hands, buries his face in the crook of Zayn’s neck. 

“I fucking - thought you were _dead_ ,” he chokes out, and even from here, Niall can see the way his fingers dig into Zayn’s waist, clutch the back of his shirt with a fist like he’ll never let go again, if he can help it. “I found your board and the zombie and there was, there was blood _everywhere_ -”

“I’m fine,” Zayn says, unnecessarily, and he buries a hand in Louis’ hair. “Lou, I’m _fine_ -”

“You’re not fine, you’re an _idiot_ ,” Louis says, and Zayn hiccups a wet laugh in response; Louis holds on tighter after that, sounds small and weak and tired when he adds, “Don’t ever do that to me again, you hear me?”

"I won't," Zayn tells him, and his breath comes out ragged. "Swear on everything, I fucking won't."

He rests his cheek on Zayn’s shoulder, sways in place a little for a few quiet moments, before he notices they've got an audience. “You replaced me?” he asks, but there’s no edge to it, even if he does squint distrustfully at the three of them, gun gripped a touch tighter in his hand. “What happened to your arm?”

Zayn turns towards them without letting go, brushes his mouth along Louis’ temple. Niall watches him wince as he drops his injured arm - there’s red bleeding through the bandage, probably ripped a few stitches in his haste to get to Louis - and sniffs as he wipes his eyes roughly. “Got cut running away from a zombie. S’why there was so much blood everywhere. Niall rescued me.”

He nods Niall’s way, and Niall awkwardly kicks his shoe against the pavement, one hand stuffed in a front short pocket, the other waving his bloody club in acknowledgment. “Didn’t do much. Just swung a golf club a few times.”

Zayn stops smiling. “You did,” he insists, and looks at his friend. “He saved me, Lou. They all did.”

“Huh.” Louis picks the skateboard up off the ground, hands it to Zayn - Zayn takes it with a certain sense of reverence - and smirks then, at Niall and Harry. “Golf clubs? Creative. Haven’t seen that before.”

“Dunno,” Harry raises an eyebrow. “The skateboard’s pretty menacing.”

“I guess,” Louis answers, unconcerned - though he hasn’t quite managed to separate from Zayn. “Thought my best friend was dead, so I kind of lost my fucking head and used whatever was closest to me... I should thank you, shouldn’t I? For bringing him back to me.”

“It was nothing,” Harry says, and then Liam stands up straight as he can next to him, arms crossed over his chest, mouth set in a firm line. 

"Don’t assume our kindness is a weakness, though," Liam tells Louis in his best don't-fuck-with-me voice. "If I find you trying to pull some shit just because he,” he jerks his chin at Zayn, “knows where we are now, I will make sure you don’t live to see tomorrow.” His mouth curves into a barely there smile. 

"And I will make sure it hurts."

"He's right," Harry pipes up with a grin, leaning on his golf club like it's a cane, "I’ve killed people for less.”

(He’s _mostly_ kidding.)

Louis just smiles at the three of them, sharp teeth glinting in the sunlight - Niall thinks his bad side is probably not a great place to find oneself. “You saved Zayn’s life,” he says. “I won’t take that for granted. Trust me.”

“Good,” Liam says shortly, and then he turns on his heel, doesn’t bother looking behind him to see where Zayn and Louis will head, calls without glancing over his shoulder, “Be safe, you two.”

“Same to you,” Louis replies.

Harry grabs hold of Niall’s wrist, shoots him this empathetic frown as he tugs Niall back in the direction of the hotel, and Louis’ already wound an arm around Zayn’s shoulders as they walk on; Zayn twists his torso, clumsily takes a few steps forward, and stares at Niall for a long moment and Niall -

Niall doesn’t say _Wait_. Doesn’t ask them to stop. Shouldn't, anyway. Instead, he lifts a hand in silent goodbye to Zayn, even as they’re being pulled in opposite directions.

Zayn gives him an inscrutable look before his mouth pulls into a rueful smile. He nods, just once, and lets Louis steer him gently away. 

Well. That’s that, then.

They don’t encounter a single zombie on their way back to the hotel, and Liam grabs onto Niall’s forearm once they're safe inside, shuffles in close. Harry plops a chin on Niall’s shoulder behind him, too, says soft and sincere, “It’s better like this, Ni. I wish it wasn’t, but.”

Liam takes hold of Niall’s chin with a thumb and crooked forefinger, catches Harry’s eye and agrees: “New friends are just new people to worry about.”

“I know,” Niall mumbles, and lifts off his snapback, fiddles with the clasp in his hands just to avoid looking Liam in the eye, but Liam knows him better than anyone, and wraps his arms tight around Niall’s middle for a hug. Harry does the same, molds himself to Niall’s back with his mouth at the dip of bare skin at Niall's neck and his fingers curled around Liam’s shoulders so Niall's sandwiched between them.

“He was nice,” Liam says, pressing a conciliatory off-center kiss to Niall's cheek, sloppily catching the corner of his mouth. “I hope he survives this mess.”

"Yeah." Niall ducks his head. Harry's hand moves to drag up his belly and comes to a rest at the center of his chest; Niall breathes in deep against the press of it over his heart. “Yeah, I hope so, too.”

*

When Zayn finally gets to the tiny one bedroom apartment they’ve been squatting in for a few months now, in a building that hadn’t seen much better times even when the world was alive and well, he's shocked into silence.

It’s in shambles. 

Oh, everything’s filthy, these days - covered in grime and dirt and debris - but their safe haven is in worse shape than Zayn ever remembers it being: the lone mattress in the center of the room is mutilated, the tables and chairs upturned and broken. Several windows are smashed, ones that were definitely still intact the last time Zayn was here.

From his vantage point by the door, Zayn can see their supplies have dwindled as well; most of the clothes are ripped to shreds, the non-perishable food ground into the dusty, dirty hardwood, like Louis wanted to destroy every god damned memory he had of Zayn, and then destroy himself, too. 

“Louis,” Zayn steps further into the apartment, boots crunching over the broken remnants of what little life they’d made for themselves. He takes in the mess with wide eyes. “What did you _do_?”

“We went over this already,” Louis says flippantly, crawling down onto the mattress. It’s been stabbed through a dozen times with a knife, looks like. He lifts his arms up, beckoning, and Zayn goes. “Thought you were dead.”

Zayn settles his weight with his cheek on Louis’ shoulder, wounded arm resting on his chest. “So you killed the mattress?”

“I thought. You were _dead_ ,” Louis repeats. And, softer: “Living seemed really fucking pointless without you. Went on a rampage in the streets after I found your board, ripped a couple zombies to bits, and then came back here and figured I’d do the same to the furniture.”

"Two zombies," Zayn repeats. He closes his eyes, brow wrinkling. "Plus the one that chased me. And the two from today."

"Not good," Louis agrees, because it isn't. New zombies means new outbreak, and Chicago's been quiet for so long. Zayn doesn't know what they'll do if the apocalypse starts up again in earnest.

As it is now, he just scoots closer to Louis. “Don’t do that, alright?”

“Do what?”

“Give up. Don’t let yourself waste away, if I go.”

There's a beat of silence.

“ _If_ ,” Louis says carefully.

“When.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m _serious_ ,” Zayn tells him, and pushes off the mattress, weight on his good arm. “Promise me.”

Louis laughs, raspy and harsh, retorts, “ _You_ promise not to lose a fucking pint of blood while I’m running errands and then disappear after.”

Zayn drops down onto his chest again. “I came _back_. I found you.”

“Won’t always be so lucky.”

“ _Louis_.”

“I promise,” Louis sighs, combing a hand through Zayn’s hair. “I promise, okay? How’s your arm?”

“Fucking hurts,” Zayn flexes his hand, winces when it makes the muscles in his forearm twitch and burn. “Lucky Niall was there.”

“That’s the one with the hat, right?”

“Yeah."

"Hm. We should try and bandage your arm up again soon - first aid’s sort of lacking in essentials right now, but we can figure something out."

"When we get up again," Zayn sighs tiredly. "Just wanna lie here with you for a little. I missed you."

Louis just hums in response. His fingers are still calmly combing through Zayn's hair, and they lapse into another silence as Zayn's limbs settle heavier and heavier; he nuzzles into Louis’ chest, and Louis hasn't changed out of his clothes from yesterday, hasn't bothered to wipe away the blood and guts and sweat and signs of death. He smells awful. 

He smells like home.

“They were good people,” Zayn says, half-asleep, and Louis links his free hand with Zayn’s, gentle, mindful of the way the slightest movement will aggravate the wound. “Hard to find these days, y’know?”

“The one who threatened me looks a little too serious,” Louis notes, and Zayn, despite everything, laughs. 

“Liam? He told me he'd gut me if I tried anything.”

“How cute,” Louis says dryly, in that tone that means he’s impressed and won’t admit it. He takes a breath, curls in a bit (Zayn’s arm slides along Louis’ middle, and he grits his teeth until the sharp, throbbing pain that comes from the shift passes) and cups a hand to Zayn’s neck, runs a thumb along the edge of his jaw. He tips their foreheads together, eyes going wonky in an effort not to cross, and shakes his head. 

“No more separation, okay? We’ve been letting our guard down because of how little activity there’s been this year, but not anymore. I can’t lose you.”

“Not going anywhere,” Zayn murmurs. 

Louis' nose is squashed against his, and Zayn loves him so much he thinks he’d probably die for him a thousand times over. “Never?”

“Never. I promise.”

Louis nods, drops a kiss to Zayn's mouth and ducks so the crown of his head is under Zayn’s chin. “You’re all I got, Malik," he says. "My brother. Only family I’ve got left in this whole fucked up world.”

“Told them the same about you,” Zayn says, eyes drooping shut, good arm folded up between them and hand at the center of Louis' chest.

"Yeah?" Louis hides a smile against his throat. “Good."

*

Zayn wakes to gunshots, and Louis nowhere in sight.

It’s nighttime again, and he shoots up off the mattress with a hand clutching his chest to stave off a heart attack, only to cry out when an agonizing jolt of pain runs through his arm. His vision goes topsy-turvy, and he swallows down the taste of vomit just in time to see Louis rush through the door and slam it closed behind him as he heads straight towards the kitchen.

“Wake up!” he shouts, and snatches up an empty backpack; he digs through the cabinets, tosses what little left he hadn’t destroyed into it. “Zayn, get the fuck up!”

Zayn rushes dizzily to a stand, holding his arm to his chest. He blinks back pained tears and only just manages to take hold of the bag Louis throws him with his left hand. “What the fuck, Lou?”

“Zombies,” Louis’ out of breath, stuffing clothes and weapons into a second backpack. He glances towards the door when a low, croaking moan sounds in the hallway. “ _Shit_ \- can you fire?”

Zayn tries to lift his arm, winces and ducks down to catch his breath when it sears a burning sensation pinpointed over his tattoos - he hasn't had any meds since he left the hotel at dawn, and his arm's throbbing, painful enough that he can't get himself to concentrate.

“Knife,” Louis says, empathetic but firm, and he helps Zayn get on his backpack, frowns when Zayn's eyes sting as his forearm drags on the strap. He stuffs his and Zayn’s skateboards into backpack too, zips up as much as he can around them to hold them in place.

Zayn grits his teeth, holds the heavy kitchen knife Louis hands him in his left hand and asks, "How many?"

Louis' hiking his own pack on, opens the chamber cylinder of his gun and tucks his hand in his pocket to grab a handful of bullets to refill. "Let's go."

"Louis, how many?"

"Enough," he answers, shortly, and then elaborates with a sigh: "Three, maybe. It's too dark to tell, don't even know if any of my shots hit brain."

He glances up again when a dragging set of footsteps nears the door, crosses over to Zayn and holds his face in his hands, the side of his gun cooling Zayn's cheek. "Stay behind me. We just have to make it out of the building and we'll be okay, we can find a new place -"

"The hotel," Zayn blurts, before he can stop himself. "Niall and them - they'll help us."

There's a thump against the door. Louis' eyes flick towards it, and back at Zayn.

"Okay," he says, and something akin to relief pours into Zayn's veins. "Okay. The hotel it is."

He heads to the door, has a grip on the handle when he turns to stare at Zayn. "You ready?"

Zayn inhales through his nose, breathes past the pain in his arm, and nods. He can feel the adrenaline begin to itch under his skin, prays it kicks in soon to numb his body past the point of caring. "Yeah."

A smile fights its way to his mouth, jaw tight, lips curved and cruel. "Yeah, let's kill 'em, Lou."

The pounding outside gets louder. Louis smiles back, chest picking up quickly.

"God, I missed you," he tells Zayn, and then yanks open the door and puts a bullet between a zombie's eyes.

*

Harry's patrolling the lobby when Louis and Zayn arrive; he takes one look at them, covered in blood and brains, and wordlessly unchains the door from the inside to let them in.

"Stay there,” he says, setting his shotgun down between his thighs for a moment so he can lock the door back up. He grabs for it again as soon as he’s finished, aims it their way and walks a careful semi-circle around until his back’s facing the check-in desk and he has a clear view of the street behind them through the door. “You alright?”

Zayn eyes the barrel. “Yeah.”

“Good.” Harry nods, and rolls his shoulder out, finger twitching on the trigger. "Now strip. Please."

"Harry -"

He jerks the shotgun up and fires a warning towards the ceiling without looking away. The stray shell falls to the floor, and he shakes his head. "I'm not fucking kidding. You're drenched in blood - I can't tell if you've been bitten or not."

Louis laughs, harsh, too-loud in the quiet of the night. "You let us in."

“Better to kill you in here if I have to than you gettin’ caught in the middle of that, if you _aren't_ bit," Harry lifts his chin towards the street. Zayn leans on Louis, turns his head. They'd run into two more zombies on the way, after killing the three in the apartment - Zayn's arm is bleeding again, a bright light to murderous, flesh-eating moths - and one still stands outside, Zayn's knife stuck in its chest.

A door slams open behind Harry. Liam skids into the lobby in a panic a few seconds later, Niall following right behind, flashlights in their hands. 

"Oh, Jesus, you scared us -"

"You're back," Niall says.

"Check 'em, yeah, man," Harry asks, glancing Niall's way, and Niall nods before closing the distance between them. He does Louis first, methodically lifting his clothes like he did Zayn's yesterday, wipes at suspicious globs of blood while Liam holds their flashlights steady in his hands before deeming him passable.

Niall takes his time with Zayn.

Zayn chalks it up to the fact that he’s starting to sway dangerously in place without Louis to lean on, but whatever the reason, Niall’s touch is different, even from yesterday. It's gone from perfunctory to attentive: fingers skimming under his shirt, skating across the warm skin of Zayn's thighs, hips, neck. He's gentle in the way he pulls Zayn’s arm away from his chest, clicking his tongue faintly when Zayn makes a pained sound he can’t be fucked to muffle. There’s blood already drying along the edges of his bandage - and if he thought he ripped the stitches open before, he’s sure of it now.

It’s not a bite, though, so Niall releases his grip on Zayn’s wrist, lets him cradle his arm once more, and nods to Harry.

“They’re clean.”

Harry exhales loudly - this _whoosh_ out with puffed up cheeks and wide smile. “No offense meant with the threats, but you know how it is," he tilts the shotgun up so it rests on his shoulder. "Precautions."

"No worries," Louis says, though he gives the gun another fleeting look. "Think you can set up another room then, now that you aren't planning on killing us? And maybe give Zayn s'more meds?"

Harry cranes his neck to look to Liam and wait for confirmation; Liam waves a hand, signaling for them to follow him through the lobby and up the main staircase to the elevators. "Yeah, let's get you a room. Side stairwell’s this way - we've got water, too, if you want to clean up."

" _Please_ ," Louis says, and he reaches for Zayn, but Zayn lifts a hand to hold him at bay.

"M'fine, go ahead."

"You look like shit," Niall tells him bluntly from off to the side, and Zayn squints at him.

"Thanks,” he says dryly. “You think you can multitask and at least fix my arm while you insult me?”

Niall grins. “Could try."

The other three are already headed towards the stairwell; Zayn stands in the middle of a hotel lobby that hasn’t been running for two years, that he couldn’t have afforded even before the world ended anyway, with an ache in his arm and the faint sound of moaning coming from out in the street. There’s a chandelier above his head and fake potted plants that probably looked expensive once-upon-a-time, now covered in cobwebs to his left and right, and Niall stands in front of the main staircase and kicks the toe of his shoe against the carpeted floor. 

"Thought you weren’t coming back,” he says, and then, with another little half-smile and a step forward: “You probably shouldn’t have.”

Zayn lets out a huff of laughter, and looks down. 

“I wasn’t going to,” he admits.

“Yeah,” Niall kicks his foot against the floor again, sways back and then forward to curl his fingers first into Zayn’s sleeve, and then at the small of his back. Niall steers Zayn up the stairs, like he doesn’t trust Zayn’s equilibrium enough at the moment to let him climb without assistance. “Harry wasn’t supposed to stay with us. I wasn’t supposed to rescue you. Funny how these types of things never work out properly.”

“Oh, you’re one of those,” Zayn says as Niall leads them to a stairwell entrance and pushes the door open. Louis, Harry and Liam’s chatter is background noise three flights up, and Niall laughs.

“One of what?”

“An optimist.”

“A realist,” Niall disagrees. “At least I _know_ bringing you here yesterday was a terrible idea. An optimist would’ve thought maybe you were going to help me find a cure or something.”

Zayn leans into him as they climb, and tells himself it’s just because he’s dizzy. “Think that’s more of an idealist’s thing. Pipe-dreamer. Whatever.”

“You’re just being argumentative for the sake of it now,” Niall says, mouth twitching again like he’s trying not to smile. He emptily threatens, “Shut up or I’ll let you bleed out in the stairwell.”

“You're all talk,” Zayn sighs. They’re on the third floor landing now, and he takes a second to breathe, rest his temple against Niall’s shoulder. He's too tired for anything but honesty: “I felt safe here. Don’t know any of you, but I felt safe. So.”

They start up the stairs again, and Niall seems distracted as he hums something under his breath; he flattens his palm at Zayn’s back properly, glances at him and says, “Not much safe space left.”

He pulls open the stairwell door at the fifth floor landing, lets Zayn through first and then pats his shoulder and points down the hall to the room where Zayn first woke up. “C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up, and then we can take a look at your stitches.”

*

Liam gives them a room two doors down from the one Zayn slept in yesterday, looms in the doorway to watch Louis stuff what little items they have left into drawers - sans the weapons Liam’d already confiscated when he’d first searched their bags - while Zayn sits on the bed and tries to stave off another wave of nausea. He’s clearly guarded about their presence, even though he gives Zayn a painkiller and an antibiotic the moment he can, after sending Harry and Niall off on a hotel quest Zayn and Louis aren't privy to.

Now, as Liam tells them what's going to happen next, he's giving the gun Louis keeps on him at all times a tight frown when Louis opens the empty cylinder to refill it.

“Niall and Harry’re getting the water for you two,” Liam says. “Louis, you’ll take the bathroom down the hall, in room 515. Zayn, you can find me when you’re done, and I’ll take a look at your wound, or find Niall -”

“I can do it -” Louis interrupts but -

“I’m not telling you where our supplies are,” Liam answers without pause. “Me or Niall, that’s it. And I’ll be right outside your bathroom, Louis, so you should think before you fill that thing up with bullets again.”

Louis tips his head up towards the ceiling and sighs. 

“Look, I’m sure we’ve all done things of dubious moral value in the past two years or so,” his head lolls to the side, facing Liam, “but I’d like to think my word can still count for something when I say we’re not going to try anything.”

Liam just shrugs. “What’s your word got to do with anything when you got a gun in your hand that can say whatever you need it to?”

Louis studies him for a moment, and then strides across the room. Zayn follows, stumbles up off the edge of the bed dizzily, says his name with an outstretched hand and only a hint of panic - Lou's dangerous when his hackles are raised - but Louis just holds out the gun, loose grip around the handle, barrel pointing down.

“Fine. Take it.”

Liam doesn’t have to be told twice.

“For now,” Louis tacks on.

“We’ll see,” Liam throws over his shoulder as he leaves.

Zayn lets out a breath and steps up to Louis to knock him gently with his shoulder. “Don’t antagonize him, Lou. I’m pretty sure he meant it when he said he’d gut me. I like my guts.” Louis just slings an arm around his waist to lead him towards the bathroom; Zayn jabs an index finger into his side. “And you gave him that gun way too easily.”

“If that’s what it takes to get him to stop hovering,” Louis says. He pats Zayn’s hip and helps him sit down on the toilet seat lid. “Besides, I have a knife hidden somewhere on my person.”

Zayn groans. “ _Please_ don’t tell me you hid the switchblade in your Vans again - you’re going to cut off your fucking toes one day.”

Louis just laughs, sets heavy hands down on Zayn’s shoulders and then slides one into the hair at the nape of his neck and tilts Zayn’s head back. “You’ll be okay, by yourself?”

“Think I got enough left in me to give myself a sponge bath, yeah,” Zayn jokes, and Louis’ still smiling, but it’s softer now. He blinks back tears, suddenly, and his mouth does that weird pinched tremble when he’s trying not to cry. 

“Lou?” Zayn asks, timid, but Louis shakes his head. 

“I just really,” his voice cracks, and Zayn hugs him as tight as he can with his good arm slung across Louis’ back. “I really thought you’d been bit, you know? I feel like you’re a ghost. Or like I’m dreaming - like I’m gonna wake up and find a monster that looks like you on the street instead of _this_ you.”

“My heart’s still beating, swear,” Zayn says. Then, quieter: “Would you shoot me?”

Louis backs away. “Shut up.”

“Would you?”

He’s leaning against the wall, scratching at his hair, and he looks straight at Zayn when he says, “Yeah. Yeah, you know I would.”

“Right between the eyes?” Zayn asks steadily, and Louis’ eyes are still so bright, but he nods anyway.

“You wouldn’t feel a thing, Z.”

“Hey.” 

They both look towards the door - Harry and Niall are there, with five gallon jugs hiked up on their shoulders. Harry jerks his chin at Louis. “Follow me.”

Louis wipes his face roughly, gives Zayn one last glance as he makes to follow Harry. “You’ll be okay?” he asks again, and Zayn nods.

“I’ll be okay.”

*

The first thing Niall does is pour him a cup of water and hand over a travel size toothbrush and toothpaste. Zayn grins in thanks, moves to the edge of the tub and brushes his teeth as he watches Niall stuff the stopper in the drain and fill it up so the water's a few inches deep. He swishes water around in his mouth, spits back into the cup as Niall shrugs off his backpack and pulls out a pair of plastic containers, three washcloths, a towel, and a bar of soap. The towel goes on a metal bar, one washcloth gets placed on the lip of the tub, and he fills the containers, sets them down precariously on top of the toilet seat lid so they're within easy reach.

"For the cut," he says, and drops a washcloth into each. "One basin for cleaning, one for rinsing. Don't mix. Soap," he gives Zayn the bar, and holds out a hand in return. "Arm."

"No nonsense," Zayn murmurs, but offers it up anyway. His wound's a dead ache at this point, a continuously throbbing sensation that feels like it'll never let up, and something must pass over his features when Niall peels away the bloodied gauze because he clicks his tongue disapprovingly.

"You have to let this heal, alright? Look," his thumb hovers over the wound - the blood’s dried in patches, half the stitches ripped open, Zayn's skin slightly inflamed. "You could have an infection."

"What a piss poor choice of words during a zombie apocalypse," Zayn says, and there's a weighted silence before they both laugh.

"Jesus." Niall balls up the bandage waste, jerks a thumb at the door. "I'll be waiting in the room to re-do it, just shout when you're done." He lifts the backpack with his free hand, and the door clicks softly shut behind him.

All in all, it’s not so terrible; Zayn can’t really remember the last time he bathed properly, and it feels good to get the grease out of his hair and the dirt and blood off of his skin. He’s rubbed raw nearly everywhere, the cleanest he’s been in weeks, and he can’t gauge how long he’s been in there - cleaning around his wound probably took a half hour itself, at least - but he’s surprised Niall hasn’t burst in yet to check if he’s drowned himself. 

He's patting his body down with the towel in his left hand when he realizes he didn’t bring a change of clothes in with him, mutters _Shit_ and awkwardly tries to wrap it one-handed around his waist. He sits on the edge of the tub again, calls out a hesitant, “Niall?”

There’s rustling from the room, and a moment later, Niall trudges in, first aid supplies bundled in his arms, kicking in a battered stool with the side of his shoe. “Hey, you done - ? Oh.”

Zayn clutches at the towel where it dips and smiles lopsidedly. “I, uh. Forgot my clothes.”

Niall blinks. “Right. I can see that.” 

He dumps the supplies in the sink, shifts his weight on the balls of his feet before hurrying back into the bedroom, returns with a pair of boxers and a white tee with a questioning expression - he has no idea which are Zayn's and which are Louis', after all - until Zayn nods his thanks. He hands the clothes off to Zayn and pointedly looks away to set up the supplies on the counter while Zayn wriggles into cleanish underwear, towel still mostly on.

He stands, holds the shirt out towards Niall with a tilt of his head, and Niall helps him get it on over his head, stretches the right sleeve so Zayn’s arm doesn’t graze it. "Thanks," Zayn says. "Fuck ton easier than when I tried to do it earlier."

“Could’ve asked for help.”

“Was mostly naked, by that point,” Zayn tells him with an arched brow, and Niall’s mouth twitches up at the corners. 

“I’ve seen Liam and Harry naked tons of times. Not like it’d be that big a deal.”

“Yeah, well, we all can’t have group orgies in fancy hotel rooms, now can we?” Zayn asks, and Niall actually throws his head back and gives a short, bright sunburst of amusement in the form of a laugh.

“You’re delirious,” Niall says once he’s gone quiet, and his head is ducked but Zayn’s pretty sure he’s still smiling. “M’blaming the jokes on your injury.” He pats the empty counter space next to the bathroom sink next to the supplies; Zayn hops on, rubs at his eyes with a fist and holds his forearm resting on his thigh.

"Alright. Do your magic."

"Haven't had a chance yet to really look at all your tattoos." Niall swipes an antiseptic pad lightly over the cut. "Got a ton."

“Yet,” repeats Zayn. 

When Niall pauses from ripping open a second antiseptic pad, Zayn spreads his legs, catches Niall's hip with a knee and forces him closer. Niall goes, stumbles and shoots an arm out to rest on the counter and keep himself from bumping into Zayn's chest.

"I have tattoos in lots of places," Zayn says, smiling with his tongue pressed up against the back of his teeth, and Niall narrows his eyes.

"How's your pain tolerance?"

"What are you -" 

Niall nods down at the half-question; there's a surgical suture kit next to them, carefully laid out on a blue pad along with a pair of tweezers and nail scissors, a fresh roll of gauze, ACE bandage with clasps, and antibiotic ointment.

"Don't worry, the stitches are absorbable," Niall says cheerily. He curls his fingers under Zayn's chin to bring them face to face once more, thumb pressing in under the swell of Zayn's bottom lip. He leans in and smiles when he whispers, "You don't want a bite stick or something?"

Zayn lets his eyes flick from Niall's hand to his mouth, and grins back crookedly. "Fuck you," he says, and Niall snorts - just this short exhale out through his nose - and drags the stool closer to sit on it.

He picks up a pair of tweezers and sets Zayn’s arm down, injured side up, on Zayn’s thigh. "No need for the like, macho posturing," he says. And then, a touch more serious: “I have to pull out the old stitches first; you're definitely gonna start bleeding again. The skin's already sore, and it'll just irritate more, but we really need to close it and let it heal properly."

He glances up, nodding slightly. "Tell me if you need me to stop, okay?"

"Please," Zayn scoffs. "They're just stitches, how bad can it be?"

Niall's just arches an eyebrow, and gets to work.

*

Taking stitches out of an inflamed wound is very bad, it turns out. _Fucking awful_ is the term to describe it, actually - Zayn's arm is sore and _burning_ , the wound only just tentatively hanging on with a new layer of skin, and every old stitch Niall snips with the tiny nail scissors feels like he's trying to rip Zayn's skin off in the process.

He's being as gentle as he can, Zayn knows, wearing a deep-set frown as he works and pausing every few minutes to wipe blood away and re-sterilize the area (to give Zayn a chance to stop holding his breath in). 

Zayn exhales shakily, scrubs a hand through his hair and tugs on the ends to distract himself as Niall stitches the wound back up again. He's lost track of how long it's been - can't check, anyway - but suddenly Niall's sitting up, neck and shoulders twisting and adjusting to work out a few kinks. He drops the suture onto the counter with a satisfied nod, and Zayn looks down.

Little black lines are holding his arm together; the wound is a jagged pattern that starts an inch up from his wrist, and then ends four inches after that. Niall stands, kicking back the stool a bit, and does up Zayn's bandage deftly. When he pins down the second clasp, he asks, "You okay?" 

Zayn tries to send him a withering look as he sags against the long mirror above the counter before giving up. "Fine," he sighs. "Can I have another painkiller?"

"Nope," Niall says. "Every four to six hours. You've probably still got another one to wait, at least." He's smiling as he shakes his head. "I asked if you needed a bite stick."

"Shut up," Zayn mumbles, but he's chuckling, and rests his cheek against the mirror; it's cool against his upper cheek and his forehead. He shuts his eyes. "Thank you."

"No big deal," Niall says, and it sounds like he's packing up. "...Did you wash your face?"

Zayn cracks open one eye at the non sequitor, and then the other. "Uh. What?"

"No, like - you _did_ , obviously, but your beard, it's," he gestures to his own face. He's barely got anything, a sort of five o'clock shadow. "Blood. There's blood in it."

"Oh," Zayn pushes off the mirror. He hadn't bothered to look in it before, doesn't so much like seeing what the apocalypse has done to him - but he turns his head enough to look now, and Niall's right, there's clumps of matted blood in the course hair along his cheek and chin. "Must've sprayed my face when I stabbed that zombie in the chest."

"Want me to fix it?"

"Nurse _and_ barber," Zayn notes. He curls a leg onto the sink counter and resists the urge to run his fingers over the too-sharp cut of his cheekbone, the dark circles under his eyes that never quite go away. He turns and sags against the mirror again. "Yeah, alright."

Niall attempts a smile that falls short at that, and stuffs his hands in his pockets. After a moment, he jerks his chin up at the mirror and tells Zayn quietly, "I don't like them either, anymore.”

Zayn watches his eyes track the edges of the mirror with the smallest wrinkle gathering between his brows. 

“Your reflection never looks like who it’s supposed to be.”

(Niall’s face is all angles - wrong, somehow - and Zayn's overcome with the sudden urge to take him home and have his mother serve him up some _biryani_ until his cheeks fill out a bit.)

“Louis and I went out yesterday morning to look for more food,” Zayn starts carefully, and it’s half a response, half an unspoken request. “And Louis destroyed whatever was left when he thought I wasn’t coming back.”

Neither of them says anything for several beats, and then Niall glances out into the bedroom and back at Zayn before gesturing in that direction. “I’m gonna... go get - I need something to cut your beard, anyway. Hold on.”

He’s gone for several minutes, and comes back with a pair of scissors and a Clif Bar. He tosses the energy bar at Zayn. “So, turns out, Liam had the same idea I did - he’s getting rid of Louis’ scruff now. Harry’s next, apparently. And Louis said he wasn’t hungry -”

“He’s lying,” Zayn says, ripping open the packaging and chewing off half the bar in one bite. 

“I know. Which is why Liam told me to grab a handful and leave ‘em on your bed.” 

Niall foregoes the stool this time around to step in close, in between Zayn’s knees. He waits for Zayn to finish the second half of the energy bar and then waves the scissors in front of Zayn’s nose. “We serve dinner at eight in the main hall. If you’re late you won’t get any porridge.”

“How bad is it that I can’t tell if you’re joking or not,” Zayn says through a mouthful of - he glances down at his crumpled up energy bar packaging - _Crunchy Peanut Butter_ , and tips his chin up when Niall nudges its underside with a tap of his index finger. 

“I am,” Niall allows. “We eat in our room, usually. But dinner actually is oatmeal.” He waggles his eyebrows. “ _With_ cinnamon, thank you very much.”

“Look at you, with the spices.” Zayn smiles, without even meaning to. “ _Top Chef: Apocalypse_.” 

“You’re teasing me while I’m holding sharp blades,” Niall tuts, and snips at a clump of beard at Zayn’s chin. “Not a very wise man, are you?”

“ _Did_ go on a food run with a skateboard as a weapon yesterday.”

“Shh,” Niall says, eyes lowered somewhere around Zayn’s left cheek. He’s almost grinning, now, teeth straight and even, the kind of perfect that only comes from dental realignment. “Again, sharp blades, right in my hand.”

Zayn ignores him. “Did you have braces?”

“What? Yeah. Got’em off when I was nineteen, thank fuck. Just imagine all the fifteen-year-olds who have metal mouths for the rest of their lives now.” Zayn opens his mouth to respond and the scissors flash in front of his nose again, in warning. “ _Ah_ \- seriously, stop talking unless you want me to stab you in the mouth accidentally. I’m actually really good at this, you’re lucky I’m not charging.”

Zayn stays silent the entire time Niall painstakingly clips the facial hair at his upper lip, holds himself completely still until Niall moves onto the right side of his face. He cuts off another chunk of beard; it falls into Zayn’s lap, and Zayn starts talking again, even when Niall sighs at him. “So you - you do this for each other a lot?"

"Hm?" Niall's focused on his cheek now, but he nods before cutting off a particularly stubborn patch of bloodied hair. "Yeah, guess so. Harry sorta can't get past a crustache, but his hair gets matted sometimes. We shaved Liam's head entirely once."

He nudges Zayns face up more to carefully groom the underside of his chin. Zayn laughs throatily, Adam’s apple bobbing against the edge of a blade. "Yeah?"

Niall's not smiling, but his mouth picks up at the corner, fleeting. "Like a month after Karen died.”

“His mom?” Zayn asks, and Niall sucks in his bottom lip, and nods.

There’s no tremble there, no tears suddenly tracking down his cheeks - the only reason Zayn can see the grief in Niall’s features is because he knows what it’s done to his own expression, and he draws his hands up hesitantly, drops them to Niall’s waist. Hopes it’s at least a little bit comforting. 

“Y’know,” he says, stares at Niall’s mouth as he releases his bottom lip. “Liam told me he’d flay me, if I hurt you.”

"Payno's never been big on subtle." Niall’s eyes snap to his, and away. “You weren’t planning on it, were you?”

Zayn can’t shake his head without jostling the scissors, so he tightens his hold on Niall’s waist instead. “Not if I can help it.” 

“Good,” Niall says, subdued. He lowers the scissors and sets them down on the counter. “You’re done.”

Zayn twists his torso to check Niall’s work in the mirror; his beard’s cut as close to his skin as possible now, the excess falling in tufts off his thighs and onto the floor as he turns back to Niall.

Niall’s hip bumps his knee. "Now you look like a respectable zombie killer,” he says, and Zayn doesn’t think about his next move too much, just nudges where his hands are still spread at Niall’s waist until Niall shuffles forward.

“What?” he murmurs, but Zayn doesn’t answer.

Not with words, anyway: he sneaks his fingers under the hem of Niall’s shirt and steals a skimming touch across the hipbone, watches Niall’s mouth part on an exhale, cheeks tinged with the softest flush.

Zayn breathes out a low, "Thanks," and he’s not sure why he’s doing this - flirting with someone he's only known for a few days like they’re hooking up in the bathroom of a house party instead of stitching up wounds from a fight with a zombie. Maybe he’s got a fucked up case of knight-in-shining-armour syndrome. Maybe his subconscious secretly thinks Niall looks really hot when he’s beating a monster to a more permanent death. 

Or maybe Zayn’s only been around one person long enough to’ve forgotten what this felt like - forgotten that _kickstart your heart, skip a few beats in the process_ response to undemanding attraction - and he is suddenly, foolishly, all about making bad decisions in the face of impending doom. 

Because if the world weren’t dead, this would be the part where Zayn kisses him. 

(He _wants_ to, and he hasn’t wanted anything like this in years. It’s surprising nearly as much as it is bittersweet.)

Niall absentmindedly licks his lips, knuckles brushing where Zayn’s ass is planted on the counter, and Zayn’s arm is aching, but so is the need to lean forward and close the distance between them. (He’d _forgotten this feeling_ , and he’s not sure how.) Niall’s hand unfurls, fingers digging in at his hip; their foreheads bump together and Zayn fists Niall’s shirt in his hand and thinks _Please -_

"Zayn?” 

It's Louis, calling out hesitantly from the bedroom; Niall snatches his hands back like they’ve been burned and stumbles out of Zayn’s arms until his back hits the open door. He smears a fist across his mouth like it’ll wipe away the want and smiles repentantly at Zayn for a mistake he didn’t even let himself make. 

Louis appears in the doorway, leaning against its frame, and Niall says, “I...” 

He doesn’t bother finishing the thought. Zayn can figure what he’s trying to say, regardless: _I can’t. I won’t. I shouldn’t._ He holds Niall’s gaze, even when he can see Louis volley a slow, perplexed look between them in his periphery, and then takes a breath and slides off the counter. 

Zayn shrugs, turns on his heel when he bypasses Louis and smiles at Niall standing frozen at the door. “Nah, it’s cool,” he says, unconcerned, even though resignation is settling in his chest.

And it is cool, it _is_ \- they’ve all got mental lists of things they aren’t allowed to have now that the world's gone. 

Not like adding Niall to his will make much of a difference.

*

Louis and Zayn head to bed around midnight - so says Liam, anyway, who has the only working watch between the five of them. He makes good on his promise from that morning and guards their door so they can’t leave, thumps against it every once in awhile as if to remind them of his presence in the hall.

He didn’t give Louis his gun back, either, and Louis grumbles about it with his face buried in Zayn’s chest for the entire length of time Zayn attempts to fall asleep before Zayn frustratedly pinches him in the side.

“Lou, I’m _tired_.”

“But I miss my _gun_ ,” Louis laments, and rubs his nose back and forth against Zayn’s sternum. Zayn combs a hand through his hair, revels in the way Louis’ arm, snug across his waist, tightens in response.

Zayn twists a strand of hair at Louis’ nape around his finger. “You’ll get it back.” 

Louis huffs. “Be honest, did Liam completely fuck up my hair? I told him to give me dirty pop punk, but I think he went full mullet like an asshole.” His tone aims for light, just to make Zayn laugh. It works. Then, Louis inhales deep and picks himself up, plants his hands on either side of Zayn to look down at him. 

He says, “You smell like -”

“Soap?” Zayn guesses. “Not-blood? Dusty hotel sheets -?”

“You. You smell like you.” Louis finishes, and plops back down, heavy and warm. “So we’re staying here, then?”

“Yeah,” Zayn mumbles sleepily. “Don’t have anywhere else to go, do we? And it’s safe here.” He inhales and turns on his side, onto his good arm. Louis rolls with him, lets Zayn tuck his face down into the crook of Louis’ neck, cheek mashed against a pillow. He tenses. “Is that - I mean is that cool?”

“Don’t mind, I guess,” Louis answers. “Once Liam stops stalking us, anyway. I like Harry and Niall, though.”

“We got food here,” Zayn neatly skips past the _Niall_ part. “And medicine. Think it’ll be good, if we stay awhile.”

“Mm." Louis sighs, palm dragging up the length of Zayn’s back, and he asks as careful as he ever does anything, “Sure there’s not another reason? Like, maybe whatever the hell that was in the bathroom earlier?”

Zayn nuzzles in closer and swallows hard.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he lies.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Desperation deliriously claws its way into Zayn's chest as his breath catches on a moan, and it's fucking terrifying, blindingly terrifying, wanting to keep someone alive without knowing if you can. Without knowing if they’ll die by bite. Without knowing if you'll be the one who'll have to pull the trigger.
> 
> It's _terrifying_ , but Niall trembles underneath him, digs his fingers into Zayn's hips until it hurts, and Zayn hopes vaguely that he'll have bruises all the way down to his bones come morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  the poem zayn quotes is an english translation of neruda's "tu risa"/"your laughter"  
> 

Breakfast is easily one of the most awkward experiences of Louis’ life so far - which is saying something, he thinks, given that he’s spent the past two years discovering increasingly odd ways to kill both zombies _and_ boredom.

The day starts at seven. Louis knows this because Liam barges into their room to tell them. He briefly contemplates flipping Liam off and burrowing under the covers with Zayn for another hour or two, but then Liam mentions the words _food_ and _now_ and _if you don’t get up, you don’t eat_ , so the two of them begrudgingly climb out of bed and follow him to a separate room. 

It's the Presidential Suite where the other three sleep, which means there’s a built-in mini kitchen and half a dozen rooms, and a proper table with chairs set around it, where canned beans and beef jerky await them - _a feast!_ Louis whispers to Zayn, who tries very valiantly not to laugh before he drops down onto the seat nearest the guy who saved him. Liam and Harry are sitting across from them and Niall, who is wearing a Cubs snapback today that’s ripped along the brim and dotted with dried blood, offers Zayn a plastic spoon and a smile. Zayn takes both, pats the empty seat angled next to him so Louis can sit too, and then -

And then _nothing_. Absolute silence, save for the scrapes of spoons against tin and the sound of chewing. At some point, Louis bites into a piece of jerky and holds it at nose-level for a moment to scrutinize it.

“What?” Zayn asks, once he’s noticed Louis’ stopped eating. The other three look towards him at that, and Louis’ mouth twists up thoughtfully.

“Little weird,” he says, and pops the rest of the jerky in his mouth. “Y’think this is what we taste like to zombies?”

Niall and Harry both make a noise, Liam sets his can of beans down a little too hard and Zayn sighs, "Please don't ruin jerky for them."

Louis surveys the faces around the table and aims a self-satisfying smirks in Zayn’s direction. Too late for that. The silence extends another painful amount of seconds, and Louis stretches obnoxiously loud and pushes his seat back to stand. "Well, this has been fun, but I think I'll take the rest of my food to our room -"

"Sit down," Liam says around a mouthful of beans.

Louis lifts a brow. "Or what?"

Liam's got a handgun trained on him in the next breath, casual as you like. The plastic spoon is dangling out of his mouth as he stares up at Louis. He looks like an absolute idiot, and Louis narrows his eyes.

"With my own gun?"

Liam just smiles sweetly around his spoon, teeth set on its handle. 

"Jesus," Louis slumps back in his seat and crosses his arms. "Are you always this hospitable?"

"No," Harry answers, and then smiles when Liam shoots him a _look_. "What, we aren't!"

"Sorry," Niall offers, gaze flicking to Zayn and away. "We're just not really used to dealing with people whose hearts are still beating." His eyes land on Zayn again, and he says even softer, "But we can try, I guess."

(For his part, Zayn stares right back, minute wrinkle between his brows, and _this_ is why finding _new_ people to be around in the face of an apocalypse is a terrible idea, this is why he and Zayn don’t save people, why they don’t find groups to join with actual places to sleep and walls built like fortresses. This is why you don’t fall in like, or love, or some warped semblance of either.

There are no such things as happy endings anymore, just brief moments of respite in the face of unimaginable danger, and Louis isn't _dumb_ , alright, he knows exactly what's happening between them. And when the other shoe finally drops in the form of a bite, Louis will be left to pick up the pieces - _literally_ \- because Hallmark doesn't make "sorry that guy you might be interested in turned into a bloodthirsty monster" cards.)

“Um,” Harry’s eyeline drifts from Zayn and Niall, to Liam, and then to Louis. “We can play a game? Like... best zombie kill?”

Louis waits approximately forty-three seconds (he knows this because he counts) and when no one else makes a move to speak, he figures he’ll open up: “Yesterday’s was pretty cool. Never broke a zombie’s neck with a skateboard before. How about you two,” he nods to Niall and Harry in turn. “Are the golf clubs a regular occurrence, or were you just bored?”

“Both?” Niall knocks his cap up to scratch at his hair. “I dunno, we found the clubs at a Dick’s and ended up losing all the golf balls within like, a week and a half -”

(“I told you not to hit them off the roof,” Liam interrupts smoothly.

“We hit them off the roof anyway,” Harry supplies.)

“- Right. And it got sorta boring, so we decided to use zombies as the golf balls instead of just target practice.” Niall pulls a face - lip curled, teeth gritted - and flexes his bicep briefly. “Still had a pretty decent swing from playing baseball.”

He inclines his head towards Harry, who shrugs quickly, muted half-smile in place. “I suck at sport... things. I just had a lot of pent up rage to get out.”

“What about you?” Zayn asks, with a jerk of his chin Liam’s way. “Ever used anything other than a handgun?”

Liam looks down at said handgun - _Louis’_ handgun, thank you very much - in his lap. “A rifle?” he says, voice lilting up at the end, but Niall shakes his head and sits up, pointing.

“No, no - Liam, remember that one time, right at the beginning. In Oak Lawn, with the steamroller?”

“Oh,” Liam looks torn between participating and attempting to keep up his demeanor of I’ll Kill You If You Breathe In Niall and Harry’s Direction Too Hard - which, like. Louis gets it, gets being the oldest and feeling like it’s all on you to protect the people you have left. He _gets it_ , but it’s still annoying as hell.

A smile flickers across Liam’s face. “Yeah, that was. That was fun.”

“ _Fun_ ,” Louis clings to the word, and grins. “C’mon, don’t leave us hanging, Liam. Make with the storytelling.”

“I’ve never heard this,” Harry leans across the table to shove at Niall’s shoulder. “A _steamroller_ \- why have I never heard this?”

“I don’t know!” Niall’s on the verge of laughing, and he sags into his seat and starts wistfully, “God, so there was this construction site we passed a few months after the electricity shut off, down south. We wanted to cut through it to get to this Hinckley Springs building, to grab a couple of those gallon bottles of water because we’d been running low. Only a few of the workers were still at the construction site, right? Like they got bit and were wired to stay on the job - I think they had hardhats on, too - anyway, we got most of ‘em, but this one zombie wouldn’t stay down. Liam saw the steamroller before I did.”

“Key was still in the ignition,” Liam lifts a shoulder and pokes at his can of beans. He’s definitely trying not to smile now, and failing miserably. “Niall had shoved the zombie down again and I just - I just wanted to see what would happen.”

He glances up, and seems to notice that he has everyone’s attention - Zayn’s hand is drooping, beans spilling off his spoon and onto the table, Harry with his chin in his hands like he’s listening to a bedtime story - and he adds hesitantly, “When the roller got to its head, it was a little like popping a pimple?”

“ _Disgusting_ ,” Zayn says, slightly awed, and Niall nudges him to grab his attention.

“Eyes were bugged out and everything,” he throws in, his own going comically wide and crossed. Zayn hides a quiet laugh behind a spoonful of beans. “Blood and shit _everywhere_ , and the best part was that it was _still growling_ up until the, y’know,” he makes a little explosive gesture with his hands, in front of his eyes. “The whole squeezing out a zit part. Remember, Li? Even Karen was cheering, and she always hated that stuff -” he cuts himself off and and snaps his mouth shut, and just like that, the air in the room goes tense again.

Louis assumes that’s the mother Zayn told him about. The one who fought back. 

Liam’s curled in on himself now, shoulders hunched and muscle jumping in his jaw. Louis doesn’t know what to tell him, doesn’t have a right to commiserate with him when he couldn’t even get back to his own family. He kicks his foot out under the table, catches Liam gently in the shin with the toe of his Vans. Liam jerks.

He looks a bit hunted when he lifts his head, like he’s been crowded into a corner; Louis can almost see the wall shutting down as he takes a breath and straightens, slowly. He swallows and starts to say something before he closes his eyes instead. “New game?” is all he asks, and when Harry speaks, it’s through a wince.

“Um... I was gonna suggest first kill next.”

Zayn is suddenly incredibly interested in the list of ingredients on his can of beans, and Louis has a disturbingly vivid flashback to beating his zombie girlfriend to death (or the undead equivalent, whatever) with a frying pan still slick with bacon grease, so he says, “Pass. Personal reasons.”

The silence this time seems impossible to work through, and they all realize it at once: Liam jerkily backs up his chair and mumbles something about patrol, and how important a routine is; Harry calmly rests his forehead on the table and sighs, Louis stretches an arm out and pats his back awkwardly; Niall rises and says to Zayn, “Want a tour?”

“No supply rooms,” Harry mumbles, and Niall flicks him in the ear without looking away from Zayn.

“No shit, H.” 

Zayn hesitates - body twitching abortively like he wants to rise to his feet, but isn’t exactly sure if that’d be a good idea - and Niall smiles warmly. “C’mon, it’s a hotel, there’s tons of stuff to check out.” He holds out a hand. “I’m a great tour guide.”

Zayn takes his hand, drops it as soon as he stands and shoots Louis a silent _Is this alright?_ Louis quietly despairs, and thinks Zayn doesn’t even realize if he were any closer in Niall’s personal space at this point, he’d actually be on top of him.

 _This is going to end badly_ , Louis wants to say. _This is going to hurt, and you know it._

He nods instead, mouth picking up briefly at the ends. “Yeah, go ahead. Maybe with Liam gone I can look for their weapons cache.”

Harry and Niall give him simultaneous glares and Louis lifts his hands. “Oh, my God, I’m _kidding_.”

“Okay, well,” Zayn takes backwards steps towards the door, where Niall’s already waiting. “I’ll... see you later?”

Louis gives him a lazy salute, and then promptly attempts to steal the rest of Harry’s can of beans when he puts his head back down on the table. His fingers inch closer, but he freezes when Harry tells him nonchalantly, voice muffled from behind a curtain of hair, “I will literally cut your hand off with that blade you think we don’t know about.”

Louis sits back in his seat with a sigh. “How?” he asks tiredly, and Harry lolls his head to the side to look at him. 

“Went through your things while you and Zayn were sleeping last night.” Harry plants an elbow on the table and rests his head on his hand. “Niall said to just let you keep it.” He grins. “ _Liam_ said if you used it, it’d give him a reason to empty the hotel again.”

“You went through our shit? _Again_?”

Harry’s gaze lifts to the ceiling in a semblance of an eyeroll. “Of course we went through your shit, _again_. It’s the apocalypse, not summer camp. We’re not your cabin bunkmates, you’re our guests here until we decide to let you stay.”

Louis scowls down at his empty can of beans. Harry twirls his spoon around on the table and tells him, “You know the _only_ reason you’re even here now is because of Niall, right?”

“Thought you were alright with it, too,” Louis says, and Harry’s mouth pulls into a frown for a moment. 

“I am. Just... Liam doesn’t trust anyone like he trusts Niall. S’like... all or nothing with them. If Niall says you’re good, you’re good. Doesn’t mean we have to trust you right away or anything.” He taps his plastic spoon against his teeth, and then gestures with it in Louis’ direction. “When Liam tells you which rooms we keep our supplies in - that’s when you know you’re okay.”

“How long it’d take you?” Louis pulls a leg up onto his seat and then sets his chin on a knee. “Zayn said Liam and Niall didn’t even know you, Before.”

Something quietly bittersweet passes over Harry’s features, and then he heaves a breath in and sits up once more. “I’m a special case,” he says. “End result of a verbal Last Will and Testament.”

He tracks Louis as he rises from his seat and drifts over towards the window at the far wall. Louis’ pushing aside a curtain and peering down at the street when Harry explains: “They took me in when they didn’t have to, Liam and Niall. And they _really_ didn’t have to.”

“Mm,” Louis glances back at him. “Then what made them?”

“Karen. Liam’s mom. I think maybe she told him to, y’know? She asked to talk to him alone one last time before -” he shakes his head, seems at once regretful and despondent. “Um... before he shot her. Think that’s why he kept me around, even when he -”

He pauses, again. Chokes down a laugh, short and dry. 

“It was my fault she died, right,” Harry starts, hushed. “I was terrified and I saw these kids my age and I heard the word _mom_ and I kinda ran towards them without thinking.” He swallows, eyes downcast. “I dunno, I hadn’t eaten in like, days. I just wanted to ask if they had food and then this fucking zombie comes out of nowhere and.”

Louis’ grip tightens on the curtains. “And?”

“And she _saved_ me. She didn’t even know me, but she saved me. And then she told Liam that I needed them, that I needed to stay with them. The last thing she asked him for, and it was about some stupid nineteen-year-old kid with shit timing.”

His head’s in his hand again, and when he smiles, it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “I can’t ever repay her for what she did for me, but I can do whatever’s possible to keep her son alive. I _have_ done whatever’s possible to keep him alive - both of them,” Harry says, steely, like he needs Louis to understand that just because he and Zayn are allowed here doesn’t mean they belong just yet. “Because they’re the only family I have.”

Louis gives the curtains a yank, peers out the window once more and spies a lone human running far in the distance. They barely make it half a block before the zombie chasing them closes in.

“Well. Lack of morals when the end is nigh is always good, in my opinion - is that what you did to get this hotel, then?” Louis lets the curtain slide over and cover the window. Can’t hear the screams from way up here. It’s kind of nice. “Doubt it was empty when you found it.”

“It wasn’t.”

When he doesn’t offer anything else, Louis lifts his shoulders and rolls out a hand from the wrist in a _go on_ sort of gesture. “Wanna expand on that?”

Harry stretches his legs out onto the chair across from him, crosses his feet at the ankles and drums his fingers on the tabletop. “Karen’d been dead for over a month when we got here,” he says, deliberately flat and emotionless, like parroting out the story will make it easier for him to stomach. “Liam was practically a zombie anyway, by then. I think it must’ve been late fall, or early winter, because the temperature was starting to drop scary low, and we hadn’t had a real meal or bathed in weeks, kept traveling from abandoned building to abandoned building for warmth, but we couldn’t sleep for more than like, a few hours at a time.” 

He tilts his head and corrects himself with an odd sort of fondness: “Me and Niall, I mean - Liam slept even less, would always wake up to him staring at me with a rifle across his lap, probably thought I’d try and strangle him or something -”

“Get to the good part,” Louis tells him, hauling himself onto the back end of the sofa a few paces away from the table where Harry’s sat. 

“There was this lady in front of the hotel," Harry says slowly. "She had a kid, I thought - a daughter. A little younger than us. Seventeen or eighteen. They asked if we needed help.” He laughs, again. “Niall didn’t want to go in. Kept saying he had a bad feeling. Always thought Niall might be a little psychic, to be honest.”

“This is still not the good part. What’d you do?”

“We went in anyway. There was a whole group inside - maybe half a dozen, excluding the woman and kid. Took our guns, what little supplies we had left. Said they would ration it up, that it was only fair. Everyone was being so kind.”

“Rising action,” Louis reminds him, a little impatiently. “Climax. Falling action. Get to the gory bits - there _is_ a gory bit, right?”

Harry smiles grimly, answers by way of asking, “You know how you finally found out what kind of people the humans around you were when - when it was still so new? Like, who they _really_ were, deep down. Once they had the right catalyst for it.”

Louis recalls he and Zayn having to kill quite a few people they’d considered friends - people who hadn’t been bit a single time, but had turned cruel and sadistic regardless, who had succumbed to the pervasive darkness that comes out of the end of times. He nods.

“They were barely feeding us. Just, like. Crackers and stuff. And never in the same room as them, which should’ve been the second when we ran. Few nights after we got here, I heard the woman who let us in talking to the rest of the group when she thought we were sleeping. She said we...” He picks at the dirt under his fingernails, clears his throat. “Um, she said we looked weak. Like we - like we wouldn’t fight them much.”

He looks up, at Louis.

“She said we’d give them enough food for weeks, if the temperature stayed low enough. That the ‘one who lost his mother’ had given up, anyway, so he’d probably welcome it. That’d he’d _appreciate_ being the reason someone else stayed alive.”

“They,” Louis’ brow furrows, and his stomach dips uncomfortably. “They weren’t really -”

He stops, can’t even really imagine what Harry’s implying. Harry hums in response, tilts his chair back. “Do you want the nice version, or do you want the truth?”

“The truth.”

“They were gonna eat us.” Harry speaks without mincing words in the slightest, and he looks dead at Louis when he adds: “So I just decided to take them out first.”

He gives Louis a lopsided smile, and nods down at his Vans. “Used to hide a switchblade in mine, too.”

When Louis doesn’t say anything - still waiting for _more_ \- Harry tips his chair onto its back legs again, the angle just shy of sending him crashing to the floor. “Woke Niall and Liam up. Got to the woman first because we knew she kept a few guns on her, and slit her throat in her sleep.” He shuts his eyes briefly. “She was the first person I killed who hadn’t been bit first. We used the guns to do the rest. Let the seventeen year old go, though - she was in on it too, part of the _ruse_ or whatever, but we just... we couldn’t,” he admits. 

Then, softer: “Just kept seeing my sister. Didn’t seem right.”

(Louis can feel himself nodding down at his shoes - he wouldn’t have done it, either. He doesn’t think any of them would, if they could help it. There are certain lines you just can’t cross.)

“They weren’t a family,” Harry says, and Louis glances up. “I mean - the lady and the girl were, but they - they weren’t _really_ a family, y’know? Not how me and Niall and Liam are. Not how you and Zayn have always been. They were just... killing for no reason. Killing because it was easier to lose their humanity than to actually _try_ to make it through all of this. Don’t even think the girl cared when I told her her mom was dead.”

A door opens down the hall, and a beat later, there are footsteps nearing the room again. Harry studies the door for a moment, and then keeps on:

“Put their bodies in the alley and let the zombies have ‘em, and then cleaned up what we could, and started over.” He takes a breath, chews on the inside of his cheek. “This hotel is ours because we fought for it, Louis. We earned it -”

He pauses when the door to the suite opens and Liam walks in; he doesn’t bother with speaking, just sinks into the chair closest to Harry. He slumps onto the table, arms folded under him, and holds out a hand.

“There’re rooms on the floor above us that are filled with bullet holes and blood stains,” Harry says, lightly tracing patterns onto Liam’s palm. “We never tried to clean that up because it feels like a reminder that happiness always come at a cost now. That sometimes we have to fight fire with fire because that’s just the kind of decision we have to make these days, even if we don’t like it.”

Louis holds onto the back end of the sofa and kicks his feet out, cants his head to watch the way Liam twists his fingers to tangle with Harry’s and well - this is how you survive, isn’t it? 

It’s how they’ve all survived this far without - without wanting to fucking eat someone, without losing who they _are_. Louis thinks about who he’s doing this for constantly - thinks about Zayn, and life without Zayn, and how that isn’t really a life at all. He’s family, like Harry said. Family like Harry, Liam and Niall are, too.

And it’s how you survive. It’s how you do what’s necessary and manage to keep intact the parts of yourself that matter. You find people who remind you of why you have to keep breathing, who remind you what it’s like to be human and feel things that aren’t just rage or desperation. 

You find people whose heartbeats you can’t live without, and you fight for them.

Louis stays quiet for a long while. Then:

“Show me the rooms.”

*

The hotel, Niall tells him in an exaggerated showman voice as they climb down the stairs, has been around since the twenties. “And you know the coolest thing about old hotels?” he asks. Zayn shakes his head, bites back a smile when Niall slings an arm around his neck and leans in close to whisper: “Tons of secret rooms.”

“Liar,” Zayn says, and Niall honest to God crosses his heart before pushing open the door to the next level.

“No joke. We’ve been here more’n a year and I still find shit I haven’t seen before. There’s a secret corridor for bellhops, think it must’ve been for when they were, y’know,” he waggles his eyebrows, turns on his heel to walk backward down the hall and observe Zayn’s reactions, “rendering their services to rich, lonely wives of the country’s wealthiest men.”

Zayn laughs outright. “What else, then? Better than torrid 1930’s love affairs between opposing social classes, I mean.”

Niall shoves his hands in the front pockets of his shorts and shrugs. “There’s a library on the third floor with a fake wall that slides out if you tip back a book on the third shelf.”

Zayn snorts, and Niall does another 180 so they’re side by side once more. “I’m serious!”

“Yeah, right, what book is it then.”

“Uh,” Niall pauses a beat too long. “ _Oh, The Places You'll Go_?”

“ _That’s_ the book you think of off the cuff?" Zayn tsks and shakes his head. “See, if you’d said like, a signed first edition of _Don Quixote_ or something, I might’ve actually believed it.”

“ _Oh, my name’s Zayn, and I read for fun before zombies took over_ ,” Niall teases, dopey and low. He adjusts invisible glasses. “ _Watch me major in English and quote entire passages of books written by dead authors_.”

"I can quote poetry, too," Zayn tells him. Then, just to be a shit: " _...but when your laughter enters it rises to the sky seeking me and it opens for me all the doors of life_." 

He pretends not to see Niall's smile in his periphery.

"I didn't major in English," he adds. "Did Illustration. Dream was to publish a comic book one day, Or a graphic novel, but, y’know." He gives Niall a wry smile. “Dream sorta died around the same time the world did.”

Niall knocks him in the shoulder. "I would've read it."

"You don't even know what it'd be about."

"Probably not zombies," Niall muses. He pauses, briefly touches his fingers to Zayn's wrist. "How's your arm?"

"Um," Zayn flexes his hand, tests the tightness of the muscle in his forearm. The bandage is neat and clean still, and it doesn't hurt nearly as much as yesterday. "Alright."

"I brought meds," Niall jams his hand into his pocket again and comes up with a palm full of pills. "Two antibiotics and a few low dose painkillers, just in case."

"You just had those with you?" Zayn asks, but Niall makes a noncommittal sound and tucks the pills back into his pocket.

"Grabbed 'em before we sat down to eat." He glances at Zayn. "Told you, I wanted to take you on a tour."

"Oh." Zayn's lips twitch into another smile. "Cool."

Niall skims fingers along his wrist again and smiles. "Let's go," he says, pointing towards the stairwell at the opposite end of the hall. "I wanna show you the fireplace downstairs, and the fountain. And the banquet hall - !"

"One thing at a time," Zayn crooks an arm around Niall's neck, and ignores the very loud, very insistent part of his brain that continues to point out the many, _many_ ways this could go wrong. "We have all day."

"And then some," Niall agrees. When he turns to look at him, Zayn can see a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose. "Hopefully."

"Hopefully," Zayn repeats.

( _Hopefully_ , he thinks, catching Niall's eyes flick down to his mouth and back up, _I don't regret this too much_.)

*

They search the hotel for hours, only resting for a while longer when they get to the fireplace so that Niall can grab one of the refilled water bottles lying around. Zayn tosses back some antibiotics and Tylenol, guzzles down the water as he follows Niall down a winding hall before coming to a stop in front of a set of grand oak doors.

"Ready?" Niall asks. When Zayn asks what for, Niall says, "The Gold Coast Room," then puffs out his chest and grins. "Or, a snapshot in time."

He doesn't let Zayn's curiosity linger for long, grips both door handles tightly and yanks, lets them swing open in a sweeping gesture as he shifts to the side to let Zayn through. Zayn takes slow steps as he walks into the room, Niall following along behind him, cranes his neck to take in the space in its entirety.

“Woah."

A hand claps down on his shoulder. “Right? Fucking wild.”

There are two rows of intricately patterned pillars on either end of the room, and Zayn runs a hand upwards along the one closest to him. Tips his head back to catch sight of rows and rows of chandeliers lining the ceiling, cobweb-covered and teeming with dust - and a single empty space with a corresponding pile of shattered glass on the floor.

Dozens of tables dot the room - some tipped over, plenty smashed to bits, presumably for fires. Those that are still standing are set with silverware gold-rimmed plates and champagne flutes that probably cost more than all of Zayn’s old textbooks for a semester combined. At the center of the room is a large open space set up like a dance floor with a long linen-covered table at the head, a DJ booth to its right.

There had obviously been some kind of an event held here, and Zayn walks in deeper, boots crunching over glass and utensils and bits of wood.

“It was a wedding.”

Niall’s voice makes him jump - he'd nearly forgotten he wasn't alone - and when Zayn looks over, Niall’s pointing to one of the tables by Zayn that’s mostly undamaged. There are placecards set around it, bent and yellow and cracking, and Zayn picks one up.

 _For the Charming Caroline Watson..._ , it says in a curlicue script. There’s a wedding party box on the table too, most of its contents long gone, but the tag is still there: 

_Louise & Tom - July 23rd, 2013. _

"I think so, anyway,” Niall continues, arms outstretched towards the pillars as he makes his way to the center clearing. "Last one the hotel had, I’m guessing. Food was long gone by the time me, Harry and Liam got here - would’ve been spoiled, even if there was some.” He looks pained. “Booze was gone, too. We’ve still got chairs and tables left for fires though, at least.”

Zayn studies the gift tag in his hand. “This - this is -”

“Sad as fuck,” Niall finishes, and Zayn laughs hollowly. 

“Yeah." He can feel Niall's eyes on him, and he lifts his head again. "What happened to them, d’you think?”

“Dunno. Left in a hurry, though - you seen the date?” Niall circles a finger around the rim of a champagne flute, picks it up and lets it slip through his fingers and fall to the floor, where it shatters with a sound like wind chimes. “Couple weeks before I got out of the hospital. Can never figure out why they’d wanna do that. People were already turning by then - someone was probably bit before they came here, there’s a bloodstain in the corner over there.”

He jerks his chin in the direction of the west wall, near the DJ booth; Zayn can see it, this time, a sickly reddish brown splatter on the wall. On the edge of the linen-covered table. On the dancefloor.

Zayn drops the gift tag onto a nearby table and heads over to Niall. “Maybe they wanted one last thing. Like, getting married. One last good thing. One last time to be happy.” 

Niall doesn’t respond right away, but a delighted smile spreads slow and wide once Zayn's close enough to touch, and Zayn shrugs again, laughing self-consciously. “What?”

“Now who’s the optimist?”

“Shut up," Zayn scoffs without heat, shoving him lightly. "I just. I can - I get it. Wanting this.”

“Marriage?” Niall says, brow arching in casual disbelief. 

“Normality," Zayn corrects; Niall's smile fades to a moue. "Something the undead can’t touch. The virus seeps into everything - there's never any room to just _breathe_ , you know? I feel like I'm choking on it most days."

Niall's head lolls to the side as he scratches the hair under his snapback. " _Sure_ you didn't major in English?"

Zayn plucks Niall's cap off before he can second guess the gesture, plops it onto his own head and combs through the wilting fringe on Niall's forehead. He takes a breath and holds it, lets his fingers trail along the sharp line of Niall's jaw. " _...if suddenly you see my blood staining the stones of the street, laugh, because your laughter will be for my hands like a fresh sword_ ," he quotes, and then smiles. "Yeah, I'm sure."

"What're you gonna do next, Shakespeare," Niall says, faint smile belying the dry tone of his words. "Serenade me?"

"That was Neruda," Zayn huffs out a laugh. "And I can, if you want."

"He really can."

Niall and Zayn turn towards the double doors; Louis' at the entranceway with Liam and Harry, bouncing up on the heels of his toes with his hands in his pockets as he continues, "Zayn’s got a voice like an angel, if angels did insane riffs and idolized Kendrick Lamar."

Zayn resists the urge to roll his eyes and backs away from Niall as nonchalantly as possible with a flat, "What're you doing here."

"Looking for you. You've been gone all morning." He walks his fingers along the edge of a table, slyly glances at Zayn. "Got distracted?"

Zayn sweeps a boot across the dancefloor, clearing an arcing section of dust. Over his shoulder he tosses, "Surprised Liam hasn't throttled you yet."

"I thought about it," Liam says, crossing the room with Harry to get to the dancefloor as well. "Twice."

Louis drawls, "I'm touched," and then takes a real look around the room, eyes wide. "Jesus. Was this a wedding?"

“Mhm.” Harry reaches for Niall the moment he can, arms around his waist, ducking his head to nip at Niall’s neck and mumbling, “Sad.”

“Yeah, it’s sad,” Louis says. He hauls himself up onto the elevated table near the DJ booth. “It’s the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.” He catches sight of the bloodstain Niall’d pointed out earlier on the linen inches from his thigh, ghosts his fingers over it and frowns. “Think they made it out?”

“Hope so,” Liam says with a sigh, dropping into a seat at the table, behind Louis. “Hope someone got _something_ right, for once.”

“We get things right.” Niall hooks an arm around Harry’s neck; Zayn leans against a pillar, eyes half-lidded as he watches them sway in place. “Sometimes.”

This bittersweet ache settles in the atmosphere, and the five of them fall silent, stuck in another time and another place where death didn’t permeate every aspect of life. Louis hops off the table, is right in front of Zayn before Zayn realizes. He’s got a broken champagne flute in one hand, Zayn’s chin caught between the fingers of his other; he leans up, glances a kiss high up on Zayn’s cheek and turns so they’re side by side. 

Louis holds the champagne flute high in the air. 

“A toast!” he says. “To the - groom, and groom,” because Harry and Niall are in the center of the floor. Harry barks out a laugh and Niall dips him in the next moment, lips puckered exaggeratedly as Liam picks up a utensil from where he’s sitting and gently knocks it against the flute in front of him. 

“Why am _I_ being dipped - shit - !” Harry makes a strangled sound when Niall loses his grip, and they fall to the ground in a heap, dust swirling around them. He smacks a kiss to Harry’s chin, another to his mouth, and his shoulders are trembling with laughter as Harry rolls them over and shakes his hair out so a shower of dust falls over Niall. 

There’s bloodsplatter on the wall and a heeled shoe near the DJ booth that looks like it might have once belonged to a bride, but Liam’s not even bothering to hide a smile, and Louis’ fingers are wrapped tight around Zayn’s wrist like an anchor, and Niall’s sneezing in between delighted cackles -

And just for a moment, everything feels normal.

*

Zayn learns that there is a routine for everything. 

More often than not, one of them can be found patrolling the ground floor of the hotel, mostly out of habit than anything else by this point. Niall instructs Zayn on how to do it, when it’s his turn - shows him how to walk along the inside perimeter, how to check (and recheck, and _recheck_ ) the barriers he, Liam and Harry have put up against any potential entry points for humans and zombies alike. 

Every few weeks, two of them will leave the hotel to stock up on any supplies that are in danger of dwindling too low - though they’re always well stocked in general, Liam says - alternating whoever stays behind to watch over the hotel while they’re gone. 

(“It was Harry’s turn, when I found you,” Niall tells him, testing the give of some planks boarding up a window with a few strategic tugs. “Imagine if he’d gone instead that day.”)

One of the best parts of their routine, Zayn thinks, is the water. They’ve collected so many jugs and gallons over the past year, and refill them with purified lake and river water when they’re low, and the beauty of this - as well as living in an entire building filled with luxury tubs - is that Louis and Zayn are possibly the cleanest they’ve been in years. 

Harry’s getting his hair trimmed by Liam when he informs Louis and Zayn that they usually limit baths to once a week, but it can notch up to two - or even three - in the summer, depending on how unbearably hot it gets. Zayn doesn’t care so much about the explanation, he’s just glad that he and Louis’ aren’t wearing grime like a second layer of skin anymore, that he can keep his beard at a manageable length and free of bloodied clumps like the ones Niall cut out the first night he and Louis came back, that he can trim his nails and feel vaguely normal once the blood and dirt are freed from under them.

There are still moments of awkwardness and unease, but they’re trying, and slowly, _slowly_ , Zayn and Louis begin to find where they fit. 

Despite Louis and Liam taking far too much joy out of getting under each other’s skin as often as possible in this weirdly competitive way that Zayn is sure would have just devolved into elaborate pranks Before, Liams knows now that Louis doesn’t actually want to antagonize him day in, day out and jeopardize their safety. And while Louis isn’t used to not being the one in charge, or having the upperhand, he’s willing - _begrudgingly_ , but always willing - to fall in line and make adjustments. He listens - he and Zayn both do - when Harry tells him not to search for where the supplies are kept, listens when Liam offers advice on how to change the bandage on Zayn’s arm, listens when Niall shows him a new golf swing he’s perfected to take down a zombie in two hits, flat. 

And through it all, an actual friendship starts to form. 

It winds around them unhurriedly; the new routine becomes the standard itself and Zayn and Louis begin to relax, bit by bit, until they start looking forward to breakfast, and perimeter checks, and lounging in the same room without feeling like everyone in it is just waiting for the tension to split them down the middle.

When it’s three weeks after their arrival and Zayn has to have his bandage changed for the last time, Liam tells him to get Louis to do it instead. Zayn’s not sure he’s heard correctly at first, asks him to repeat, and Liam says, “Medical supplies are in the Chanel boutique on the first floor, by the perfume.”

His words are steady, weighted with what he isn’t saying; it sounds sort of like he’s asking them to not fuck up the fragile trust that’s only just started to stick, and Zayn takes the quiet direction from him for what it is: acceptance.

Liam also gives Louis his gun back. They move into the second bedroom of the Presidential Suite a week later, and there are hundreds of spaces to occupy in this hotel, but Zayn never feels quite as safe as he does here, with them. 

*

The Niall Thing™ - which is what Louis’ taken to calling it every time he and Zayn have hushed conversations about it, every time Zayn lets his touch linger a moment too long; the Niall Thing™, like it needs the capital letters _and_ a trademark, just so Zayn knows how ridiculous it is - is an entirely separate issue.

Sometimes there are days where it all just feels a bit like harmless flirting: there’s teasing, and banter, and laughter, and on _those_ days, it’s easy enough for Zayn to navigate around. Easy for him to forget that there’s an entire set of creatures outside of these walls that would love to see him dead, that would love to take a chunk out of Niall as if he’s a midnight snack instead of a person. 

Sometimes there are days where Zayn just wants to shake Louis awake in the middle of the night and tell him _Please, let’s go, let’s leave before this is too much -_

And then there are days like this one:

Zayn wakes up just before sunrise, light barely starting to peek through the curtains, when he realizes Louis is gone; he’s not sure where, but before he can wake himself up enough to worry, Niall comes knocking at his door. Says that Louis’ stolen Liam and Harry away in an attempt to convince them to test out his Aerial Strikes From The Rooftop plan, or something equally fancy-slash-dangerous sounding, and, “Can I sleep with you? I don’t wanna be alone.”

He doesn’t wait for an answer - would’ve been yes, anyway - just crawls onto the bed and flops down tiredly next to Zayn. There’s a half a foot of space between them. Zayn’s asleep once more before he even properly opens his eyes.

The next time he wakes, Zayn catalogues two very important things: he has his arm around Niall, and he's hard. He’s still in the moments of in between, that half-awake, heavy-lidded semi-conscious state that’s all quiet sighs and minute twitches, and it almost feels like somewhere else. 

Some _when_ else, rather.

Like waking up mid-afternoon on a Sunday, sated and happy. Like arguing about who'll get up to start the coffee, and who stole which blankets, and whose toes are always colder regardless of the season.

(In the moments of in between, Zayn keeps his eyes closed and pretends.)

He buries a sleepy frown again the nape of Niall’s neck and tightens his hold on Niall’s waist, and Niall stirs slowly in response, snuffles into the pillow under his head and makes sleep soft sounds, not quite ready to face the day yet.

He squirms, back flush to Zayn’s chest, and the movement has Zayn suddenly, _intensely_ , hyperaware of every single point of contact between them. He shifts away, careful not to jostle the mattress, but Niall just makes another lethargic sound - this one laced with a note of disapproval - and follows Zayn back with his hips. 

Zayn’s wide awake now, immobile, afraid to do so much as open his eyes in case it’ll break the hushed, sleepy spell. 

He knows the exact moment Niall wakes fully, because he stiffens, shoulders hunching up, and Zayn braces himself for the inevitable empty space that'll appear next to him in the span of the next few moments - but then Niall purposefully scoots backwards, _closer_ , and his hand finds where Zayn’s free arm is folded up under the pillow. 

Zayn flattens his palm across Niall’s sternum, counts the rising beats of his heart, slides his arm down again until it’s slung low on Niall’s stomach, and he tugs Niall right up against him like it’s nothing. Like it's the simplest fucking thing, like he could do it forever. 

He rolls his hips, barely, just testing, inhales sharp when Niall’s bitten-down nails roughly scratch along his forearm, still under the pillow; Zayn tucks a hand under the hem of Niall’s shirt until it unfolds over the jutted bone of his bare hip, fingers sneaking past the elastic waistband of his boxers.

Niall says _Zayn_ and turns between one breath and the next, curls a thigh over his and fists the threadbare fabric at the small of Zayn’s back to hold him in place. It’s a flurry of movements after that: Zayn hitches his thigh further up the bed so Niall can ride up against it, dick trapped beneath useless boxers and slotting just right at Zayn’s hip, where his body curves into Niall's. Niall buries his face in the crook of Zayn’s neck, bites down at Zayn’s shoulder to muffle himself, and it’s like the fucking bottom drops out of Zayn’s chest. 

All the air leaves his lungs at once, feels like, and he stutters out an exhale, rolls Niall onto his back and sits up to straddle his thigh. There’s a flush high on Niall’s cheeks and he’s breathless and the world pauses, just for a _millisecond_ \- Niall’s eyes are on his, and Zayn doesn’t look away, wouldn’t even if he _could_ \- and then everything speeds up in doubletime;

Zayn hauls his shirt over his head and tosses it away. Niall’s hands are at his waist, tugging down on the basketball shorts Zayn slept in, huffing impatiently and then pushing himself up, too - and shoving Zayn down onto his back in the process. Zayn laughs, hardly audible, with his head hanging off the bed and Niall on top of him, because this is just - this is so stupid, this is the worst thing he’s ever _done_ \- 

Niall comes a few minutes later, rutting against each other half dressed, like they're sixteen and trying to get each other off before someone's parent gets home from work. He promptly shimmies down once he’s recovered, curls his fingers into Zayn’s shorts and underwear both, and yanks them down in one go. 

He smiles - or it’s on the edge of one, with his lips dragging along Zayn’s hip - and bites a mark over the tattoo on Zayn’s upper thigh. His mouth’s on Zayn in the next instant, hand at the base of his dick, and Zayn grabs a handful of Niall’s hair and curses, loosens his grip a touch when he hears Niall choke, lets go completely when he hears it a second time. 

Laughs, _again_ , when Niall pulls off to sigh, “Worst fucking gag reflex in the history of for-fucking- _ever_.” It’s the first complete sentence either of them have spoken since they woke up, and his chest is still rumbling with laughter when Niall swallows him back down, when Niall eventually guides one of Zayn’s hands back to the crown of his bobbing head, when he comes with Niall’s name coaxing a smile across his mouth. 

And then Zayn's foot kicks out from where it's been planted on the bed, and the last thing he sees before tumbling abruptly backward and onto the floor is Niall swiping at the corner of his mouth with a thumb. 

"Ow,” Zayn buries his face in his hands. “ _Oow_.”

“Fuck,” there’s a shuffling sound and when Zayn peeks through his fingers, Niall’s at the edge of the bed, peering down at him with his cheeks still flushed and his hair in disarray. He bites his lip, _tries_ to bite back a laugh. “You okay?”

Zayn wriggles back into his underwear - it’d been hanging off one ankle for awhile anyway - and pushes himself up to sit with his back to the wall. “M’fine. Got distracted.” 

“I mean, I knew I was good,” Niall says blithely, sitting cross-legged on the bed, “but I didn’t know I was _forgot gravity was a thing_ good.” 

A low chuckle rumbles out of Zayn’s chest once more, and Niall doesn’t bother tamping down his laughter, just flops backwards onto the bed and wheezes helplessly into a pillow.

It’s only when Zayn starts to trail off that Niall does, too, and then all they’re left with is a sudden, growing silence like a chasm between them as reality shoves it’s way back into the room. 

Zayn lets his head thump back against the bedroom wall, the last remnants of a smile disappearing from his face, and it’s not the first time he's wished things were different, but it’s the first time that it makes something cold and dark and cruel grip his chest tight in this distinctly horrid way. Zayn could have him, sure. Could do this every morning, and laugh the whole way through. 

Could also be the one to put a fucking bullet between Niall’s eyes the day he gets bit.

Zayn unfolds his legs, climbs back up onto the mattress to see what’s waiting for him. Niall’s staring up at the ceiling, expression unsettlingly blank. Zayn doesn’t say anything, just waits, and then Niall shakes his head so minutely that if Zayn’s eyes weren’t trained on him, he’d’ve missed it. 

“We can’t,” Niall says, no louder than a whisper. He sits up jerkily, a far cry from earlier, and shakes his head again, more vehemently this time. “ _Shit_ , Zayn, I’m -”

 _Sorry_ sticks in his throat, and Zayn starts to speak, starts to say, _It’s okay_ \- or, or maybe _It’s not okay, but at least we’re breathing_ \- when the door to the Presidential Suite opens and the cacophony of Louis, Liam and Harry’s voices comes crashing into the room. 

Neither of them moves as Louis’ footsteps near the bedroom and he throws open the door.

“Oh - uh. Hey,” Louis says. 

(Niall’s looking at Zayn and Zayn’s looking at the bedsheets.)

“Everything... alright?”

“Perfect,” Zayn says dully, and Niall takes a dragging breath in like it hurts. 

He rises off the bed and mumbles a half-hearted excuse to Louis before leaving, and Zayn still won’t pick his head up. 

“ _Really_ ,” Louis says, and if it were any other situation, it’d have come out snotty and sarcastic. As it is, Louis shuts the door behind himself, crosses the room and climbs carefully onto the bed to sit in front of Zayn. 

He hesitates as he settles, asks, “Don’t have to watch out for a wet spot, do I?” and when Zayn can’t help the way his face crumples at that, Louis leans in and clucks sympathetically. “No, hey, I’m just messing.” His palms are warm on Zayn’s cheeks. “Really, are you okay? What happened?”

He doesn’t give Zayn a chance to answer, just grabs him by the shoulder and pulls him into a hug. Zayn goes easily, sags against him with his hands curled into fists at Louis’ sides. 

He asks Louis, “Do you want to leave?”

“What?” Louis maneuvers them around until he can look Zayn in the eye. “Wait - _what_? ...Do _you_ want to leave?”

“Because,” Zayn talks over him, throat scratchy and aching, “if you want to leave, now’s the time to do it. Probably won’t even hurt that much.”

“Zayn -”

“I’m giving you an out,” Zayn finishes, and he’s bizarrely proud of the way his voice doesn’t shake. “If you want to to leave, we’ll leave.”

“I don’t want to leave,” Louis says softly. And, again: “Zayn, do you?”

Louis' hand comes up under Zayn's jaw when he doesn't respond; Louis nudges him gently, catches his eyes. “Hey. Do you want to leave here?”

Leave here, leave _Niall_ \- Zayn pauses, takes a breath in, and then another, and then brokenly says _no_ with a resigned finality that makes him think he really means _never_.

Louis nods, only once. 

“Good,” he says. “Me neither.”

*

“Hey.”

Liam blinks his eyes open from where he’s been curled up on the sofa, trying to nap, and finds Harry grinning down at him as he sits up on the back end. They’re supposed to be getting ready to leave again, for a supply run, but the heat’s too much this morning, and they’re all a bit drowsy. 

Harry shoves off the edge and lets himself fall like a dead weight onto Liam’s stomach. Liam groans, tries to lift Harry off in vain, and chokes out, “Yeah?”

Harry adjusts until he’s leaning against Zayn on the opposite end of the sofa, and he kicks a bare foot out at Liam’s shin. Liam grabs his ankle before Harry can even make contact and yanks; Harry grunts, only manages to not fall onto the floor by virtue of Zayn reaching out quick to keep him in place. 

“What do you miss?” he asks, finally, and gets a chorus of dry laughter in return. He picks his head up off Zayn’s lap and rolls his eyes. 

Liam figures Harry knows why they’re laughing: the things they miss nowadays are innumerable, checked items on a list that never, ever ends. 

“Lots of things, H,” Louis says. He’s starfished on the floor in just his underwear, eyes shut and scratching lazily at Niall’s hair from where Louis’ llying perpendicular to him, Niall’s head on his stomach. 

Harry sighs. “No, I don’t mean like that -”

“Not the stuff that hurts, you mean?” Zayn murmurs sleepily, face buried into the weave of the sofa’s arm as he tries to push Harry into a sitting position. 

“Right. Not the stuff that hurts.” 

(Not the stuff that hurts. Not the first Bears game Liam’s dad ever took him to, not the weight of his older sisters’ arms around him when they’d been away at school too long and pretended not to miss him, not the way his mother had told him _I am so proud of who you are. Remember that._ right before he put a .22 caliber bullet through her skull.)

“The small stuff,” Harry finishes, soft now. “Like air conditioning. WiFi.” 

Louis offers up, “Music. What’s the point of an apocalypse if I can’t make a playlist on my phone called, like, ‘This Literally Shit All Over _The Walking Dead_.’”

“Yeah, I miss music,” Zayn says, and Liam watches amusedly as he and Louis silently air-high-five across the room without opening their eyes. “No lie, Lou, I miss our volcano vape, too.”

“Rest in peace, dear vaporizing friend,” Louis says solemnly. He cracks open an eye then. “What else?”

“I miss parties. And drinking games - beer pong,” Harry says, crawling forward on the sofa to drop down onto Liam again, gentler this time, and Niall groans. 

“Beer at _all_ ,” he says. He buries his face in his hands and turns onto Louis’ chest, who pats his head in a placating manner. “What I wouldn’t fucking give for a house party right now.”

And Liam softly says, “Birthdays,” because he doesn’t know what day it is currently, but he does know it’s late summer. He sits up when the others look at him, and shrugs. “Think my birthday’s around this time? Niall’s too.”

“Really?” Zayn asks, and Niall makes a noise of assent.

“Liam’s a month older than me.” He sits up the same time Louis does, and tilts his head. “Think he’s right. I’m September and he’s August, and it feels like late summer, doesn’t it? We’re probably right around one of ‘em at least.”

“We should plan something,” Louis says, and Zayn blearily lifts his head to shoot the room a thumbs up before setting it back down. 

Harry’s hands are shoving into the cushions at Liam’s sides as he smiles down at him. “That’s a great idea, we should do that. Do you wanna do something for your birthday, Liam?”

Liam squirms into the sofa, tries to burrow in deeper. “It’s not a big deal, I was just - I was just answering your question. We’ve all missed birthdays -”

“Nah, I wouldn’t mind a party now,” Niall says, and he sounds genuinely excited, drowsiness already forgotten. “Can there be a theme?”

“Zombie golf,” Harry says immediately, but Zayn tells him, “Something you _don’t_ do every time you leave this place, Harry.”

“Well - um. The beach?” He slumps against Liam, brows knit together as he thinks. “Ah... we could try and climb the El tracks?”

Liam dutifully reminds him, “That’s dangerous,” and Louis cackles. 

“That’s amazing! We can make a game out of it. Maybe catch a couple zombies, toss ‘em off the train platforms and onto the third rail -”

“I think,” Liam starts, very carefully, “that I should have some say in this. And I don’t want to be electrocuted on what may or may not be my birthday. Sort of.”

Zayn snaps his fingers in Liam’s direction in what seems to be agreement. Liam’s not even sure he's fully awake. 

“Oh.” Niall perks up then. “Mini golf. Or not - um. Navy Pier? It’s like a thirty minute walk from here, tops.” 

“Well, what about zombies?” Liam gnaws on his bottom lip, lifts a shoulder. “Do we really wanna go out and risk it?”

“We were already gonna go out for supplies,” Harry points out. “We can just substitute. _C’mon_ ,” he whines, and Niall joins in, ridiculous frown in place. 

“Yeah, c’mon, Lemo. Let’s have some fun.” When Liam doesn’t respond, he makes a high-pitched whining noise, like a puppy. “Please? For my birthday, too?”

“Ugh.” Liam swipes a hand down his face and, “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”

Harry and Niall cheer and race each other towards the bedroom to get ready. Louis declares that it’s going to be the _best birthday party ever_. 

Zayn reaches out blindly and pats Liam’s hand. 

“Don’t worry, Li,” he consoles.

Liam vows to bring an extra gun, anyway. Just in case.

*

They manage to make it to the Pier by mid-morning, weapons of choice in hand; Harry and Niall have their clubs, Zayn and Louis have guns, with Louis’ riding along on his skateboard when the ground is clear of enough debris. Liam has his shoulder rig on, both guns tucked safely into their holsters, and he breathes a little easier once they step foot on the planks without coming into contact with a single zombie.

(Maybe whatever resurge was happening when they found Zayn has died down again. Maybe they can actually have a good day.)

Niall, naturally, bypases the mini golf completely and goes apeshit when he sees the Ferris wheel. He runs up ahead, feet falling heavy on the pier, Louis coasting behind him on his board. He says confidently, "I could climb that."

"Bet," Louis scoffs, head tipped back to take in the entire wheel.

"I can!" Niall insists.

“Twenty bucks, then."

Harry says, “None of us have money anymore.”

"There _is_ no concept of money anymore," Zayn adds.

“Twenty metaphorical dollars and my hard-earned respect,” Louis corrects.

"This isn't mini golf," Liam reminds them all with a resigned sigh.

Niall hands his club off to Harry. “Whatever, I’m gonna climb it.” 

He starts a slow, calculated walk around the Ferris wheel; Louis sits on his board to watch, and the others follow suit, regard Niall as he tries to find a decent point of entry. Finally, he stops in front of a Ferris wheel car with a paint-peeled number three on either side of the door and rubs his hands together.

"Got it," he says, and waves away Liam's _Be careful_. He sets his foot on one of the lower rungs and starts to climb.

It takes Niall more than a few minutes to orient himself, but once he does, he hits the right pace swiftly, shoes finding purchase and arms reaching up with little effort. He's ten feet up when Zayn pushes himself to a stand and asks him to come back down in a tone that is Clearly Not Panicked. 

“You could get hurt,” he calls up to Niall, hands twisting together anxiously in front of him. He bites his lip, takes a few steps forward. “Niall, _please_?”

“No, come up here with me.” He’s reached one of the higher Ferris wheel cars, and grins down at them from fifteen feet up. “Bet - _fuck_ ,” he snatches his hand away and sucks at the edge of it for a moment. "Stupid thing cut me - bet I could get in the seat without falling?”

"Oh, definitely," Louis says, and Zayn gives him the most wounded look he can muster, then hisses, “ _Don’t encourage him_."

Zayn’s a good friend. A smart friend. Liam appreciates him a lot. 

“Niall, seriously, will you come down? And _no_ , I’m not going to climb up there to get you, I don’t like heights -”

“It’s the apocalypse, Zayn,” Niall shouts. “Think you’ve got bigger problems to deal with than a fear of heights!”

Liam keeps glancing between Niall, too far up now - he doesn’t bother yelling, Niall’s not too into commands, he’ll come down when he wants - and Zayn, who looks suspiciously close to having a heart attack.

“Zayn, are you alright?” Liam asks him, and Zayn’s grimace deepens. 

“Niall,” he says, lower this time. Niall stops climbing briefly to look back down. He’s more than twenty feet up now, arm hooked through one of the rungs at his shoulder to hold him in place. Zayn tells him, “Please, will you _please_ get down,” with this sweetly endearing concern, and Liam watches Niall go beet red, just before he heaves a sigh and unhooks his arm from the rung to start his trek back down to the pier.

“Fine.” He’s breathless from the exertion, grunts as he drops down another rung. “But - when we play mini golf, you’re letting me win.”

“I promise,” Zayn says, and when Liam looks at him this time, he’s smiling. 

“Big baby,” Niall complains, but he’s smiling, too. “Hate to see what you’d do if I was actually in trouble.”

“Dunno, would probably beat a zombie to death and bring you back to a hotel,” Zayn says idly, and Niall swings on a rung fifteen feet up and laughs.

And that’s when the zombies come.

*

Zayn hears the growling before he sees the monsters that the sound belongs to.

It’s muted at first, but then a dawning realization of horror unfolds over all of them as two zombie stumble around the corner of a building about a hundred yards ahead. Liam immediately speeds off towards them, Louis following with his skateboard - he drops it down and hops on in one fluid movement, pushes off the ground with long strides to gain momentum. 

Zayn hears two gunshots a half-minute later, followed the sound of two bodies hitting the floor, and rushes up to the Ferris wheel, arms outstretched to where Niall's frozen in place. “Niall - Niall, _get the fuck down_ -"

Niall's foot slips on a rung, and he clutches the infrastructure of the Ferris wheel tight, ten feet up now - there're more gunshots and -

“Oh God,” Harry says, "there's more - Zayn, look -"

Zayn glances away from Niall just long enough to witness another zombie coming around the other end of the building in front of the Ferris wheel. “What the fuck,” Harry's voice is reedy and terrified, and he grips both golf clubs in his hands. “Zayn, what the fuck?”

“Go, we need to get a path cleared if we wanna get back to the hotel,” Zayn tells him, and when Harry just stares wide-eyed, “Harry, _go_!”

Harry drops Niall’s club, grips his own even tighter, and runs. 

“Zayn - ah, fuck." Niall winces as he jumps down and his knees absorb most of the shock. He snatches his club up from where Harry dropped it and holds out his right hand. “I think I know why they're here.”

His palm’s bleeding, a two inch cut down the side under his pinky finger, just deep enough to fuck them over. "Okay," Zayn scrubs his hands through his hair, and then takes his gun out of its holster. “Okay. Stay behind me, alright - ?” 

"More!" Both of their heads whip up to follow Liam's voice. "Run!" 

He’s sprinting back towards them, Louis at his heels with his board clutched in his hand; Harry lopes around the other end of the building right after, and the five of them start off in the direction of the pier’s end before Niall doubles back.

Zayn stumbles, tries to follow before Harry snatches the back of his shirt with a hand. "Niall, what the fuck are you doing!"

"A diversion!" Niall calls out, and smears his bloody palm along the door of one of the Ferris wheel cars before running to catch up to them again. 

They skid to a halt a few hundred yards later on the Grand Avenue side of the street, shadowed on one end by the Navy Pier building and trapped on the other by Lake Michigan.

“There’s - I haven’t seen that many in - in a year,” Louis says, bent over, hands on his knees as he tries to catch his breath, chin tipped up awkwardly to speak. “We’re fucked if we don't figure something out. We don’t have nearly enough bullets.”

Zayn scans the area and swallows hard. In the distance, a group of zombies crowd around the Ferris wheel, sniffing curiously at Niall's bloody handprint. 

“What’re we gonna do?" Harry's hand curls over Liam's shoulder. "Li?”

Liam's eyes are on where Niall’s pacing behind Zayn, heels of his shoes thumping heavily against the wooden planks of the pier. “I don’t - I don’t know,” he mutters, and it’s said half to them, half to himself. “ _Fuck_. I don’t understand -”

Niall stops. “I’m bleeding,” he says, and holds out his trembling hand out once more. He’s close to tears, eyes flicking up to the very top of the Ferris wheel, in the distance. “It’s my fault -”

“No, shut up,” Louis says hotly, determinedly straightening out his shoulders. “It’s no one’s fault. We’re just gonna - we’re gonna go after them, and we’re gonna kill 'em, and then we’re gonna get to the hotel.”

“I thought you said we were fucked,” Zayn tells him, and Louis checks his gun cartridge as he says, “That doesn’t mean we just give up -”

The groans of the undead grow louder, and another horde of zombies - more than half a dozen now, at least that Zayn can see - round the building in front of the Ferris wheel. 

"How many is that now?"

"Twelve? Fifteen?" Harry shakes his head. "They're coming out of the woodwork like roaches, there might be more."

The zombies begin to sniff at the air around them, knocking into each other clumsily. In unison, they zero in on where Zayn and the other boys are huddled before making a beeline straight for the blood Zayn knows they're hungry for.

“Harry." Liam's speaking, tugging them all towards him with outstretched hands as he walks hurriedly backwards down the pier. "Harry, you don't have a gun and one of mine is empty already, so stay with Louis, alright? Niall, keep close to Zayn and I, let’s just try and - we’ll kill as many as we need to.”

“Liam, they’re not gonna _stop_ if I’ve got blood on me -”

Liam pauses just long enough to grab Niall by the jaw and tell him fiercely, “We will kill as many as we need to. Okay? ... _Say okay, Niall_."

Niall closes his mouth and nods. "Okay."

“Get to the end of the Pier," they speed up as Liam talks, the growling behind them intensifying, and Louis says, "Maybe we can push a few over into the lake, at least. Can't attack us if they're in the water."

Their group pauses again when they reach the edge of the building. There's only about a hundred yards between them and the end of the pier now. 

“We can do this,” Zayn says. “Right?”

“Yeah.” Harry’s clutching his golf club again, and he nods. “Yeah, we can do this.”

“Niall don’t leave my _sight_ ,” Liam says. 

Louis rolls his shoulders out and cracks his neck. “C’mon,” he says, and glances over his shoulder at them. He lets his skateboard fall to the ground and nods. "Just stay together."

"Stay together," Zayn repeats, hushed, as the zombies barrel down Grand Avenue like a wave crashing in.

 _Just stay together_.

*

It's utter chaos. Zayn takes out as many as he can with his gun, resorts to bashing the butt of the handle into a few skulls when he runs out of bullets, slowing them down enough for Harry and Niall to finish them off. 

The monsters are unrelenting - every time one goes down, two more take its place, and it's a fucking melee. Zayn's practically dripping with blood by the time there's maybe only ten left, and it’s become hard to keep track of where the other four are after such an impossibly short amount of time - he can only just hear occasional grunts and shouts -

And then Niall, crying out in pain. 

Zayn shoulders a zombie out of the way for Louis to shoot, stomps his boot into the face of another still moving on the ground, and whips around, searching.

He finds Niall near the very edge of the pier, rotten blood drenched down one side, weakly swinging his club at a zombie before limping away, hand clutching his thigh.

"Niall!" Zayn takes off towards him, watches in slack-jawed terror as a zombie closes in - and then Liam's there at the last second, snapping its neck with his bare hands.

Niall keeps hobbling away, and Liam moves until he hears Harry scream his name, an anguished cry for help that makes Liam hesitate, pained. He finds Zayn in the midst of everything and jerks his head towards Niall before diving back into the fray.

Niall’s limping away to the very end of the pier, face contorted in pain when Zayn finds him. He's leaning on one of the lamp posts and breathing hard, hand still bleeding, and Zayn needs to find a way to keep Niall safe so he can join back in. He glances between Niall and the gated barrier separating them from the lake, then back to where the others are fighting; Zayn climbs over, reaches out and hauls Niall over too - Niall protests the whole time, mutters, _no, no, Zayn don't -_

And then his knee knocks against the top of the fence and he lets out an agonizing sob. There's barely more than a foot of space past the barrier, once they're both standing; Niall can barely hold himself up, so Zayn does it for him, arms slung around him.

"Did it bite you?" he asks, choked, hands tightening at Niall's waist. "Did it -"

Niall shakes his head. "No, it's my knee, the bad one, think I twisted it -" He inhales erratically, and, "I can't put any weight on it, Zayn, I can't move, I _can't_ -"

"It's okay," Zayn rushes out, brushes his hair back and wipes a bit of what looks like small intestine off his neck. "You'll be okay, remember? Liam said."

He glances over his shoulder. A zombie with its bottom half twisted and broken crawls along the planks of the pier, eyes on Niall, and another is staggering into view behind it, gaining traction fast. 

Niall croaks, "Water."

"What?"

"The water. They probably won’t even follow you four if you just - jump off the edge." He grimaces, breathes in and out shakily, eyes welling up in pain. "Go get them, just leave me here."

"No, I'm not leaving you," Zayn rushes out, unthinkingly, and the second the words leave his mouth he knows he means them. "Fuck," he says, back against the fenced barrier, and takes Niall's weight so he's on his good leg, tries uselessly to block him from view. "I'm not leaving you."

“Don’t be stupid," Niall spits, tries to move like he's going to shove Zayn off the pier and into the water himself, but he can't shift more than an inch without having to bite down on his lip to keep from crying out. His eyes are so wide and bright and blue and Zayn can't let him go. He won't. "Zayn -"

Zayn cups Niall's jaw with one hand, keeps the other around his waist. "I'm not leaving," he repeats, and Niall buries his face into the crook of Zayn's neck, holds onto the front of his shirt with dirty, trembling fingers. 

"Besides," he laughs tearfully, slides the hand on Niall's jaw into his hair. "I can't swim."

"You fucking asshole," Niall tells him, muffled into the tattered remains of Zayn’s shirt.

Zayn can hear Harry and Liam and Louis shouting in the distance - cries of war, cries of them still alive and fighting - and he closes his eyes momentarily when a hot sting prickles the corners. He can't see the pier anymore, can't see how far away any of the zombies are, can't see anything but the massive lake before them and Niall's messy head of hair, and then his wet eyelashes when he picks his head up.

A zombie growls behind them, eerily, frighteningly close, but Niall won't look anywhere except at Zayn. He reaches up with a tentative hand, skims a thumb across Zayn's cheek, sniffling, eyes red-rimmed and bleary, still wincing in pain.

It feels like a long time coming, when Niall finally kisses him.

Zayn's breath stutters out through parted lips and something unravels in his chest when the pressure of Niall's mouth on his won't let up. He chokes on a dry, cracked sob that Niall matches, the fingers of one hand clasping tight around his wrist. Their foreheads bump together, and Zayn can't help it, brushes a series of kisses to the corner of Niall's mouth, his bottom lip, his Cupid's Bow.

He frames Niall's face with reverent hands that have never touched something so fucking breakable and thinks _Just once_. Niall presses the pad of his thumb to the pulse point on Zayn's wrist and kisses him back, _againandagainandagainand_ -

Zayn couldn’t die without doing this first. Just once.

Behind them, a gunshot rings out in the air and a body drops to the wooden planks of the pier with a dull thud. Zayn and Niall break away with a start, and Zayn looks over his shoulder. 

Liam's standing over the broken and twisted zombie a few feet away from them, tries to put a second bullet through its head for reassurance and when the chamber clicks emptily, he kneels and bashes the butt of his gun against its nose.

The other zombie is stumbling towards them when Harry and Louis come into view, loping around the building in front in front of the pier’s edge, shoes pounding across wood, panic and anger alight in their eyes. Harry reaches the zombie first, and he grabs both of its wrists from behind, plants his foot in the middle of the zombie's back in the same breath, and _yanks_.

Its arms rip out of their sockets. 

The zombie falls onto its stomach from the momentum, writhing uselessly on the ground when Louis stumbles to a stop and crouches down over it, one knee digging into its spine. He's got his skateboard again, somehow, holds it up high and slams it down onto the zombie's neck over and over until its head is severed. 

He's breathing hard when he finishes, and looks up at Zayn and Niall. Harry is behind him, Liam in front: a line of heroes, friends, family, splattered with blood and death. It's finally quiet again, and the unmoving monsters lie on the pier, ripped apart and battered and destroyed.

Zayn feels a gust of Niall’s breath across his cheek, feels Niall's body trembling in his arms with something akin to relief.

Harry breaks the silence.

"Um." He flips one of the zombie arms to catch the bloody stump of a shoulder, waggles the other end in Zayn and Niall's direction. “Need a hand?” 

Liam snorts and shakes his head. Louis leans on his skateboard and groans _Jesus Christ, Harry_. 

Zayn’s shoulders are shaking, and he isn't sure if he’s laughing or crying. He thinks it might be both. 

He doesn't mind.

*

The five of them check each other for bites, and then set off towards the hotel, stepping over the bodies of roughly two dozen zombies - give or take a few limbs - in the process. They only encounter a few more along the way; Zayn figures Niall's been drenched in enough undead guts to bury the scent of his blood. 

He carries Niall back to the hotel at first, with Liam and Louis on watch behind him and Harry in front, until his arms start to feel like lead. He pauses, tries to hitch Niall up, but Niall whimpers through gritted teeth and tightens the hold his arms have around Zayn's neck. 

Zayn groans "I can't," and Liam appears in the next moment, arms held out. He takes Niall's weight, one arm under his knees, the other across his back. They make it another long city block before Louis spies a rusted shopping cart toppled over on the sidewalk. One of the wheels is bent, but it's in decent shape, considering, and Harry folds in the top basket so Liam can lower Niall into the cart.

Niall doesn't speak; he keeps his eyes closed and his cheeks are wet, is mostly quiet save for the muffled sounds he makes whenever Harry pushes the cart over a particularly rough patch of gravel. They make it back to the hotel in one piece, and Louis takes Niall this time as they abandon the cart in front of their building.

He hands Niall off to Harry on the fourth floor, and went they get to the fifth, Liam doesn't waste any time: he marches straight into an unused room, rips open the curtains so the afternoon light can stream in. Zayn and Louis pull off the dusty top comforter, and Harry lays Niall down on mostly untouched sheets. Niall's awake, but he still won't open his eyes - they're shut tight, and his hands clench into fists at his sides, like he's resisting the urge to curl up around his knee.

"Harry, I need a cold wrap," Liam says, sitting on the edge of the bed. And then, pointed, "Harry!"

Harry's head snaps up from where his eyes were locked on Niall's knee, and he blinks dazedly, and then seems to come to attention. 

"Cold wrap," Liam repeats. "That _Arctic Ease_ stuff we grabbed from the CVS a few months back - can you -?"

"Yeah, yeah," Harry's nodding, nearly stumbling in his haste to get whatever Liam's just asked for in a separate room of the hotel. Liam grabs the extra pillow next to Niall and folds it in half, carefully lifts Niall's leg and sets the pillow under his knee to elevate it, murmuring _you're alright_ when Niall whimpers again.

"Louis," Liam's frowning, eyes darting between the height of Niall's elevated knee and his chest. "Can you look through the prescription bottles for hydrocodone."

"You sure?"

"Too much pain for anything else right now," Liam says quietly, and the tense set of his shoulders relaxes just a touch when Louis stands.

"Don't want him to rely on it," he says, backing out of the room. "I'll look for acetaminophen too, for later."

When he's gone, Liam leans down and gently combs the hair off Niall's forehead, strokes a thumb across his cheekbone. "Hey. Ni, babe, open your eyes."

Niall does, this fluttery movement that makes tears track sideways down his temple.

"Scale of one to ten," Liam says, glancing at Zayn once he settles on the opposite edge of the bed. 

"I don't know," Niall grimaces, clutching the sheet so tight his hand shakes. Zayn grabs it before he has time to overthink, carefully unclenches Niall's fingers one by one until he can hold onto Zayn instead.

It seems to distract Niall momentarily, their fingers interlocking together, but then he's shutting his eyes again and gritting his teeth. "Mother _fuck_ \- eleven." He chokes on a sob, and a low, wracking moan, and squeezes Zayn's hand so tight it hurts. "Fuck. Liam -"

"I know," Liam soothes, still brushing his hair back. "You're fine, it's fine -"

"But what if -"

"Niall, you're _fine_ ," Liam says sharply. 

His voice cracks. 

It's hard to tell if it sounds like a lie or not.

*

Zayn leaves once Niall conks out from the pain meds; Harry hauls up a gallon of water and Louis quickly and methodically cleans Niall up with a sponge bath, ruining the sheets underneath him with blood and dirt stains They transfer him to another room after that, rewrap his knee and give him another dose of painkillers, but Zayn doesn't go visit him again, not even after they've all bathed and eaten and sat with Niall in the intermittent periods when he's awake over the course of the day.

He's not the only one who avoids the room.

Zayn's patrolling the ground floor after the sun sets when he finds Liam, sitting on the dusty carpet with his back against the front check-in desk. He stops in his tracks at the bottom of the lobby stairs, just past the elevators, doesn't walk over until Liam notices him staring. 

Liam smiles. Or tries to. "Hey."

"Hey,” Zayn gives the lobby a cursory once over before deciding instead to sit next to Liam. He pulls his knees up to his chest and sets his rifle down next to him. Liam’s got both hands curled around his gun, held in his lap. “You okay?”

Liam lets out a breath that might be a laugh, if Zayn pretends. 

They lapse into silence after that, listen to the low growling from outside bleed through the walls for a long time, long enough for Niall to’ve woken up again, probably - the last time Zayn passed by the room, he’d been stirring restlessly in bed while Harry watched on, wide-eyed and intense. Afraid to look away. 

“Do you know how many of those things you’ve killed?”

Zayn blinks, refocuses his attention to Liam, who’s studying him now. “What?”

“Zombies,” Liam says, with a sideways jerk of his head towards the street. “Do you know?”

“No.” Zayn shrugs. There had been so many, in the beginning. “Dozens. A hundred, maybe?”

Liam’s next question comes out hushed: “What do you remember about it?”

“Dunno,” he frowns, pausing to think. “Lots of blood, I guess. Adrenaline. Fear. Rage.” He stops, again, leans a little to the side to knock their shoulders together. “Liam, Niall’s gonna be fine, you said so yourself -”

Liam turns his head quick, hand curled into a fist against his mouth, but Zayn still catches the furrow of his brow, the tremor in his chin that he tries to hide. A wave of creeping fear comes over Zayn, starts at the center of his chest and works its way out until he can’t take a breath in without feeling like he’s drowning.

He asks, very carefully, “He _is_ going to be okay, right?”

Liam nods. Zayn closes his eyes for just a moment and breathes out steadily. When he opens them again, fat tears are rolling off of Liam’s lashes and onto the back of his hand with every blink. Zayn nudges him again, a little more desperate. “Then what is it?”

"They're not human," Liam manages to get out. "They aren't - but do you sometimes forget that they were, once?"

Zayn wipes away the wetness on Liam's cheek with a crooked finger. "That's not who they are now."

"I know, but it _was_. They had families and friends and - and things they loved. They had memories. A _life_ , before all of this.” 

Zayn’s fingers skim down to cup his jaw instead and he asks gently, “What are you getting at, Li?” 

Liam takes a shuddering breath in and gestures out towards the street once more. “I don’t know how many of those _things_ I’ve killed, because they’re not even people to me anymore. They’re monsters. And I think that’s the difference,” he says, and he swallows down an awful, heart-wrenching sob and shakes his head. 

“I remember my mom. I’d remember _him_ -”

Zayn’s hugging him before Liam has a chance to finish his sentence, tucks Liam’s head under his chin and holds on tight. He takes Liam’s hand between them, links their fingers together, and Liam exhales, rests his head on Zayn’s shoulder. 

“We’re going to have to leave as soon as Niall’s better,” he says.

Zayn pets down his hair. “I know.”

“It’ll be a long time before we find somewhere safe again.”

Zayn noses along his hairline, glances a kiss to his temple. “Know that, too.”

"You'll come with?"

He lifts his head. Zayn manages a smile. 

“Can’t imagine being anywhere else.”

*

Niall’s awake when Zayn gets to his room that night. 

Zayn hovers in the doorway, gripping the frame and swaying in, until Niall finally notices him. He’s bare-chested, sheets pooling around his hips, sleepy but still fairly lucid, though his face is pale and waning in the moonlight. 

Niall smiles at him - a miniscule lift at the corners of his mouth - and tilts his head along his pillow, beckoning. “Won’t bite, y’know. Unlike some things.” 

Zayn bites his lip, and Niall’s smile droops a little. 

“Stay, will you?” he asks, voice no higher than a murmur. “Please?”

Zayn rubs at his jaw and steps into the room. He’s _weary_ \- he’s heavy-limbed and so, so tired, and his throat feels rubbed raw from the screams he can’t let out. Niall waits for him patiently, and Zayn thought he was going to _die_.

He climbs onto the mattress as carefully as he can so he doesn't jostle Niall's knee and settles down in the center of it, curled up. There's a good half-foot of distance between them; Zayn hesitates, and then slides along the bed with a sigh and turns onto his side. “How’s your knee?”

“Been better. Pills help,” Niall says softly. “Louis and Liam both said it just seems like a severe sprain, so I’ve gotta keep off it for a couple weeks.” 

His hand curls into a loose fist, drags back and forth along Zayn's ribcage; fingers slip under the hem of Zayn’s shirt for a brief moment and make Zayn shiver, make him scoot closer until he can brush his mouth along Niall’s shoulder. 

“You scared me,” he whispers, a hand on Niall’s jaw, and Niall is so quiet here, weak and injured and _human_ , and Zayn shouldn't have run after him. Shouldn't have, shouldn't, because emotions are a liability, a way to trip you up and slow you down when the undead are snapping constantly, dangerously, at your heels.

"That was the stupidest thing you could’ve done, going after me," Niall says.

(At least he realizes it, too.)

Zayn's chest goes tight. “You're saying I should have left you to die?"

Niall just stares. Zayn's face crumples briefly, and he hefts himself up, plants a hand on Niall's other side so both are framing Niall's head. " _You_ didn't let me die."

"Ah, so that's what it was," Niall says. His hand sneaks further under Zayn's shirt, palm burning hot over his back. "Paying your debts."

"A life for a life," Zayn agrees. But: "It wasn't about that."

His skin prickles in the late summer heat, and Niall presses the pads of his fingers into Zayn's hip. "What was it about then?"

"You were trying to save a stranger." Zayn ducks down, mouth a few inches away. "I was trying to save a friend." 

He skims his lips along Niall's cheekbone, breathes out against his ear, and, "You make me feel a little too impulsive, you know?"

He thinks he feels Niall smile at that, just barely, but it isn't exactly pleased. "That's not good."

"And I want to kiss you again," Zayn continues, pauses and closes his eyes when Niall's thumb slips under the elastic waistband of his boxer briefs, tugs down until it snaps back gently. "I wanna kiss you, and it makes me wanna punch a fucking wall."

"Well that's even worse," Niall says, and his mouth ghosts over Zayn's beard. He still sounds ruefully amused, and Liam had said, once, that Niall sees the good in everything - but he isn't naïve. "Do you know why I rescued you?"

Zayn nods, nose brushing the shell of his ear. "Because I needed help, and you're a good person."

Niall huffs out a laugh, and Zayn moves his right leg over so swiftly that the mattress barely creaks or shifts under his weight. He sits, ass between the cut of Niall's hip, well clear of Niall's knee, hands molded to his sweaty stomach, fingers fanning out. Niall looks at him, and Zayn is burning up from the heat of this person underneath him, from confessions murmured in the dark when no one else is around to hear them.

"Right. But today - I saw you running after me, and I wanted you to stop," Niall tells him then. "And it wasn't about keeping some poor guy from turning into a zombie chew toy." He laughs once more, but it - it cuts sharp, hits Zayn somewhere in his gut. "I didn't want you to die. I _don’t_ want you to die. We only just met, and I don't want you to die. And it's the human fucking condition, isn't it? To need familiarity and comfort. To need to be around things that don't moan and bite and kill."

"We do that," Zayn murmurs, palm dragging up Niall's sternum, his neck, until Zayn's cupping his jaw. "Even before the world died, we did all of that."

Niall moves him, grimacing in pain, hands still clenched around his hips, rolls Zayn back until he's settled over Niall's groin instead. "You know what I mean," he says sharply. "I had Liam and Harry. I was fine."

"And I had Louis. And now..." he trails off, smooths the pad of his thumb across Niall's chapped bottom lip.

The first genuine smile Niall's shown in hours flickers like a shadow across his face; Zayn's own dry smile fading, heart pumping heavy, jumped up in his throat.

"I don't want you to die either." He leans down, hand gripping Niall's jaw again. "See, there's a reason you don't get close to people after the world's ended, Niall."

Niall's pulling at Zayn's boxer briefs, bunching the fabric up in his fingers until Zayn lifts up onto his knees - barely anything, really, but it's enough for the waistband to slip down to the back of his thighs. His hands slide under Zayn then, ruck down his own underwear as much as he can without jostling his knee, and when Zayn rocks back, it's right onto his dick.

"I know," Niall says eventually, resigned, chin tipped up to catch Zayn's lips as he speaks. 

Zayn pushes off his chest, just enough to look at him. He brushes the limp hair off Niall's forehead as Niall's hands knock against his sides and settle at his waist. 

"I know," Niall repeats, softer now. "But we saved each other anyway."

There's a stretch of silence, and Zayn's not sure who moves first, but he's kissing Niall then, hard enough to feel the sharp clack of teeth, and then the the slide of tongues when Niall's mouth parts. He breathes out a ragged exhale as Zayn writhes slowly in his lap, and Zayn gets a handful of his hair and twists.

"This is - such a bad idea," he says, and Niall runs his lips along the edge of Zayn's jaw, palms his ass and tugs him in as close as he can, even when it makes him bite down in discomfort as his legs shift.

"It's the apocalypse, Zayn. Think all the good ideas flew out the fucking window years ago."

He can barely move with his knee propped up and swollen, and Zayn knows he'll have to move from this position soon, maybe just jack Niall off instead; Liam will probably actually kill him if he screws Niall's injury up beyond repair just because Zayn hasn't fucked anyone in two years, _been_ fucked in even longer, and is craving the kind of intimacy that only comes from having another body in bed with him that isn't just about keeping each other safe.

The heat is sweltering with Niall beneath him, panting short and erratic against his mouth, caught halfway between pain and arousal. Desperation deliriously claws its way into Zayn's chest as his breath catches on a moan, and it's fucking terrifying, blindingly terrifying, wanting to keep someone alive without knowing if you can. Without knowing if they’ll die by bite. 

Without knowing if you'll be the one who'll have to pull the trigger.

It's _terrifying_ , but Niall trembles underneath him, digs his fingers into Zayn's hips until it hurts, and Zayn hopes vaguely that he'll have bruises all the way down to his bones come morning.

*

Niall says _Stay_ , and he does.

*

Harry knows, before Liam ever brings it up, that they’re going to have to leave this place soon. If the day at the pier wasn’t enough of a shock to their collective system, he figures the hordes of zombies roaming around outside now, are. No one else is too surprised either, when he does eventually say it - _Soon as Niall’s better, we leave_. Harry’s expected it for awhile, to be honest. 

They stay indoors, still too shaken up to leave, and keep the outside world _out_ as Niall recuperates, as they decide to go south and Liam and Harry begin to sort through the past year of their lives spent in this building in an attempt to decide what stays and what goes.

(“Lucky I destroyed everything before we left that apartment, eh,” Louis tells Zayn once, grinning as he holds up the paltry items of clothing they have between them. “More room for _weapons_.”)

Niall gets better, slowly but surely, and is eventually able to start the therapy exercises and stretches that Liam remembers from his classes. 

Zayn hardly leaves his side. 

Harry expected that, too.

He likes it - likes watching them rediscover each other within a new context, likes that he can walk into Niall’s room at any given hour and find Zayn there, curled up in bed with him, sometimes awake, sometimes not. Likes seeing them happy. 

It’s still an awful idea. It’s still going to end with one or both or _all_ of them hurting. But that, Harry figures, is sort of the whole point of life in general now: you have to constantly decide what is worth the eventual hurt.

And anyway, he’s not the only one who’s happy for them - Liam gives Zayn a Very Serious Nod Of Approval one night, a little after Niall starts moving around again; Louis cuddles in close to Niall a day later, when they’re all having breakfast in bed with him, and murmurs _You’re a good egg_ in this fond way that makes Zayn smiles faintly when he hears it.

The first full day Niall can manage to walk around the halls of the hotel without limping back to the room a short time later, he and Zayn disappear for hours. Harry gives up searching for them after lunch, trudges back up the stairwell to the Presidential Suite, where Louis is on his stomach in the living room, carefully counting pills still in their bottles and marking their numbers and strengths in one of Liam’s beat up Dollar Store notebooks with a unicorn on the cover.

Harry slumps into the armchair closest to him. “What’re you doing?”

“My taxes,” Louis says flatly, without looking up. Harry’d kick him if it didn’t even involve stretching his leg out. Probably. “Counting out what we’ve got left - did you know you guys stole _birth control_?”

Harry just shrugs. “Where’s Niall?” he asks this time, and the end of Louis’ mouth curls into a smirk.

“Fucking Zayn in the lobby.”

“ _Liar_ ,” Harry laughs, and Louis shakes his head, taps the pen in his hand against the spiral edge of the notebook. 

“Liam saw them when he went to go patrol like ten minutes ago. Came up redder than a fire truck, mumbling something about making them signs to hang up if they aren’t going to at least put a sock on a door, it was hilarious.” When Harry just keeps staring, he scoffs and opens up another pill bottle. “Fine, don’t believe me then. Go check for yourself - here, take Liam’s gun, he stopped mid-patrol anyway, so you might as well make it useful.”

“This isn’t going to end up being a prank, is it?” Harry asks, rising and taking the proffered handgun; Louis rolls onto his back and slants his head against the carpet.

“What, do you _want_ to see them fucking?”

Harry lifts a shoulder. “Don’t have a TV. It’s like watching a soap.”

“Fair point. If you see them, let them know dinner’s in a few hours.” He smiles, adds wryly, “I’m sure they’ll be starving.”

Harry says, “Will do,” and heads out. It’s only a few minutes walk to the lobby from the fifth floor, and as soon as he passes the elevators on the ground floor, he’s almost positive Louis was telling the truth.

There’s a quiet, murmured conversation and hushed laughter filtering out from the lobby. Then Harry hears Niall moan. Loudly.

He rounds the corner with a smile, glances towards the sitting area. He can't see anything from his vantage point - just the crown of Niall's head on the back end of the sofa, sagged low with Zayn in his lap. He's got on one of Liam's tanks, oversized enough on an already-thin frame that one half has slipped down over his shoulder, as well as Niall’s Bulls snapback with the brim facing backwards.

Niall shifts suddenly, does _something_ new that has Zayn catching his breath. His mouth parts and his brows knit together as his hands shoot out to grip tightly onto the back end of the sofa. Harry laughs, sharp and surprised, and then claps a hand over his mouth.

"In the _lobby_? Jesus, I thought Louis was _joking_."

Zayn freezes, and then licks his lips and buries a laugh into the crook of Niall's neck. Niall, for his part, tries to tip his head further over the back end of the sofa to smile at Harry. "Go... away," he says, careful and stilted. Zayn peeks up at Harry from where his chin is resting on Niall's shoulder, and Harry grins wolfishly.

"Nah," he says as he steps closer, blasé. "Haven't watched porn in years, almost want 3D glasses for the cumshot."

"You’re so weird," Zayn says, halfhearted at best, fondly at worst. He pushes off the sofa to sit up again, drops a hand to Niall’s shoulder, eyes going half-lidded for a moment as he sinks down. 

Harry lifts a brow. "Come on, then," he goads in a low voice. "If you're gonna do this in the lobby, you might as well put on a show."

"Ignore - him, he's just trying to rile you up," Niall tries, but Zayn - gaze locked on Harry - just rocks down deliberately slow into Niall's lap. Niall tips his head onto the back of the sofa again, groans _Fuck_ like it’s got five syllables and a built-in prayer.

Harry pushes his fringe out of his face and scrunches his nose up. "Is it voyeurism on my end if you're already in a public place?"

"Dunno," Niall says, a smile in his voice; Zayn combs a hand into his hair, twists it in his fist and kisses Niall roughly. "Mmf - fucking - _Jesus_ , Zayn - is it a public place if everyone's dead?"

"A morbid riddle for the ages," Harry shakes his head and clicks the safety off the gun in his hand. "You want me to be lookout for your sexcapades?"

He figures he can do a few slow laps around the ground floor, a quick perimeter check, but Zayn laughs - hips moving again, back hunched over with his forehead on Niall's shoulder and a palm on his neck. He stutters an answer as Niall sucks a kiss along the tattoo at his collarbone, "You’re n - not serious."

"Y'know, there's zombies around, Malik, in case you're too distracted to notice. Getting bit while you're getting fucked is only fun if you don't actually die after. So, yes, I'm serious. In fact," Harry turns on his heel and pauses for a long moment before sliding on the pair of shades he'd tucked into the collar of his shirt. 

"I am _dead serious_."

"Oh, my God, fuck you, Harold," Niall moans through a bout of laughter. "Puns aren't even funny when the world's ending."

Harry just grins.

*

Zayn wakes up to Niall gently shaking his shoulder, crouched at the edge of the bed; he rubs his eye with a fist, mumbles _hey_ and, “What are you doing up?”

“Can’t sleep,” Niall admits, chin planted on the mattress, bottom lip poking out. The apple of Zayn’s cheek lifts against his pillow, and he taps the end of Niall’s nose with the pad of an index finger. “Can I show you something?”

Zayn stifles a yawn, closes his eyes. “Does it involve me getting out of bed?”

“Yeah. Please? Really quick.”

“Mm,” Zayn buries his face in his pillow. “Will it be worth my while?”

Niall pushes off the mattress to sit on it instead, his knee popping as it straightens out, and Zayn turns onto his back to look up at him. “I never showed you the best part of the hotel, that time I gave you the tour? The roof at night.”

“How’d you forget the best part?” Zayn asks with a smile, and Niall shrugs, adjusts until he can curl up a bit on Zayn’s chest.

“Just forgot. And I know you’re afraid of heights, but I wanted to show you anyway.” He doesn’t give Zayn an opportunity to say no, just kisses him, fingers brushing at his temple. Breathes out another _Please?_ against his mouth.

“Alright,” Zayn sighs. “Lemme find my boots.”

*

Niall doesn’t comment on Zayn’s death grip when they finally open the door to the roof, just leads them across the length of it, past what looks like a rooftop bar as an extension of the hotel, climbs over a high wooden gate before they reach the sign - _The Drake_ , letters as tall as Zayn himself, and dropping down onto the section of roof that juts out to the right of it. 

He stops them a few feet from the edge, and sits them down in front of a small brick structure that they can rest against. It’s colder up here, the wind picking up with the altitude, and Zayn lifts an arm so Niall can scoot in closer, runs his hand up and down Niall’s upper arm to combat the cool air. 

“What’m I looking at then?” 

Niall points up.

“I mean, I know you’ve seen the sky before, obviously, but it just. Amazes me, kinda. Even now. Freaked me out when the electricity first shut down, but I liked it.”

“Yeah, me too,” Zayn’s eyes scan across the sky. “Chicago was in total darkness, but I’d never seen so many stars before. Seemed like the only decent trade-off we got.”

“Exactly,” Niall says, plants a kiss on Zayn’s chin, and then his jaw, lets his head fall onto Zayn’s shoulder with a soft thump. “This has always made me believe that there’s _more_ , y’know? There’s more to the world than the shit we got stuck with.”

He tips his head back to look at the stars. There's a new layer of rough facial hair lining his jaw, and freckles on his neck shaped like constellations. "There’s always something to fight for."

Niall looks at Zayn then, doesn't speak, just lets his eyes trail over Zayn's features. They land on Zayn's mouth, intent in the way they study, and Zayn doesn't remember what unrelenting want feels like absent in the midst of danger, without expiration dates set by the grotesque bites of monsters that ruin things before they start. Zayn has spent the past few months in a constant state of doubt, but the world is lit on fire now, always, so in the grand scheme of things - _honestly?_ \- fuck it.

What's one more match struck?

Zayn moves unthinkingly, eyes shut tight, and Niall inhales sharp through his nose when they crash into a kiss. There's a beat where they break away - Niall's chest hitches - and then he's kissing Zayn again, teeth clacking painfully and breath catching when Zayn's tongue meets his. Niall grabs him around the middle, hand twisting up the back of Zayn's shirt tight in his fist, uses the other to curl around Zayn's thigh and manhandle him sideways along the rooftop. 

They're still sitting side by side, knees knocking clumsily, Zayn cupping his jaw; Niall exhales, sways like all the air's gone from his lungs, and he tips their foreheads together when their lips drag apart. His palm is heavy and warm on Zayn’s stomach, a weight tethering him down. Zayn holds onto the nape of his neck, and Niall’s mouth is right there, parted and softly panting, so Zayn kisses him again, only once, slow and gentle - 

_Tenderly_ , and this act is far more dangerous than evading the firing squads that were sent in when the virus wouldn't stop, worse than staring down a zombie and wondering if it'll be his last fight. This is a connection, like his dependency on Louis has been since the day they met, like the fledgling bond winding its way around Liam and Harry, too, like the way they're blending their two groups into one as if they were never really supposed to be separated in the first place. 

This is a tie to the humanity of his past and a bridge to whatever lies next. This is fragile and stupid and reckless and - and you don't get to _keep_ people, in a time like this. You get to lose them, and you get to feel every fucking second of it like an open, gaping wound that never heals properly. Zayn sometimes aches so much with the phantom limbs of an old life he can't forget, and - more than anything - it's not _fair_.

It's not fair that he's spent two years wishing the world would just get it over with and implode, only to find himself now, on a roof next to a guy who has a brutal golf swing, wondering what it'd be like to wake up to a future that isn't so bleak.

Niall opens his eyes and asks, breathless, “What was that?” 

“It’s another reason to fight,” Zayn answers.

(This is _fragile and stupid and reckless_ and -

And isn't that how love's always worked?) 

*

That night, they fuck in the suite with Zayn on his back and Niall holding tight to his hip with one hand; his other is planted on the bed, elbow crooked so he can rest his forehead against Zayn's as they trade staccato breaths and sloppy kisses. Zayn's too loud, for once, too overwhelmed to stifle the sounds he's making, and he can't bring himself to care if Louis or Liam or Harry are awake to hear in the room next door.

 _Let them_ , he thinks, back arching and eyes shut tight.

Let them hear how much he wants it. How much he needs it. And he licks into Niall's mouth, hands clutching at the sweat-slick planes of his back, prays to whatever is left out there still listening to just _let them survive_ a little longer, give him a bit more time to have Niall against him, in him, _around him_ , allow him this one fucking person to have close in a way he hasn't allowed himself in years.

Zayn tells him, gasping and breathless, "Don't leave me," and a soft, despairing sound gets stuck in Niall's throat. He covers the inked wing at Zayn's clavicle with a warm palm, pushes up and rolls his hips with a new sense of purpose. The words _I won't, I won't, I won't_ spill from his lips like a mantra -

And the moans in their hotel room grow louder as the nights pass,

But so do the ones outside.

*

The season stumbles hard into autumn, and the first leaves begin to break off the trees outside when Liam tells them it’s time. There’s a quiet acquiescence between them all - they’ve essentially been sitting ducks inside the four walls of this building for weeks now while Niall gets better, and it’ll only get worse the longer they wait. Only thing left to do is to take final inventory and pack up. 

They’ve got their backpacks down in the lobby - the shopping cart, miraculously, was still sitting in front of the hotel, so they’d brought it in and loaded it down with jugs of water, Zayn and Louis’ skateboards tucked safe in the front basket.

The day before they leave, Zayn’s stacking unspoiled cans of food with Harry in the suite when they hear a small explosion from outside; he and Harry look at each other for a moment, and then Harry shrugs and goes back to ticking items off the list Liam had made earlier.

“That’s Niall, probably,” he guesses. “Think Liam said something about testing out the cocktails.”

“Oh.” Zayn idly stacks a handful of Spam tins on top of each other, and then knocks them over. His mouth twists, and he fidgets, just slightly, in his seat. 

Harry sighs.

“Go on,” he tells Zayn, who straightens from where they’ve been sprawled on the floor for hours.

“Really?”

“Yeah.” Harry waves a free hand at their stockpile of food. “We’re almost done, and I want to check in with Liam anyway.”

“You’re a saint,” Zayn says quickly, scooting up on his knees and hauling Harry in to kiss his cheek before standing. 

He’s up and out of the room before Harry even opens his mouth to respond.

*

Niall's tossing a flaming molotov cocktail off the ledge of the roof when Zayn gets there. It hits the ground a few seconds later with a dulled explosion.

"Hey," Zayn calls out, and Niall is smiling when he picks his head up. He still has another unlit cocktail in his hand.

"Hi. Wanna try?"

Zayn shakes his head, shoves his hands in his pockets and crosses over the roof to peer down at Niall's test area. There's blood everywhere. He thinks he sees a leg on fire in a nearby tree.

"Liam did that one," Niall says, following Zayn's eyeline. Zayn gives an impressed nod - Liam's got a brilliant knack for mixing all of the unused chemical cleaners lying around the hotel for some reason, and it'll definitely help when they head south tomorrow. 

His hand comes up to rest at the small of Niall's back, and he kisses Niall's shoulder. "Can we talk?"

"Oh no," Niall says lightly, but he sets the last cocktail and lighter down anyway, carefully lowers himself onto the roof. He watches Zayn as he sits next to him. "You're breaking up with me."

He's joking, even if he isn't exactly smiling, and Zayn adjusts his legs so one is folded under him and the other is stretched out behind Niall. "That's not funny."

"I know," Niall says, scooting forward when Zayn's palms slip under his shirt. "Can't break up with me if we aren't dating. Can’t date if we’re barely living."

Zayn pinches his side, buries his face in Niall's neck and bites down. "I made you dinner yesterday."

"Stale Ramen." Niall's smiling now. Zayn feels his mouth pick up, too. "Romantic candlelit noodle date."

"This _is_ a five star hotel -" Zayn tries, only Niall quiets him with a kiss. Zayn cups his cheek, keeps his eyes closed even when Niall pulls away a fraction of a distance.

"What'd you wanna talk about?" He's whispering, twirling the drawstring of Zayn's sweats, and he nudges Zayn’s cheek with his nose. "What's wrong?"

Zayn shakes his head, then stops and sighs, sags into Niall with all his weight and tugs him in as close as he can. "Are you scared?" he asks. Niall drags a hand through Zayn's hair and kisses the only place he can reach on Zayn without lifting his head - the dip of his shoulder. 

"I'm always scared,” Niall says. “The life I can remember when I _wasn’t_ doesn’t even feel like it’s mine.” His voice is hushed, and he hesitates, like he knows there’s more Zayn wants to say, like he knows Zayn won’t say it until Niall urges him on. “What are you asking, exactly?”

Zayn can’t make himself answer, and Niall just lopes his arms around Zayn’s waist and plays with the hem of his shirt. His shoulders are tense as he waits, and Zayn steels himself with a quick three-count in his head before he asks, “Are you ever scared you’ll have to kill one of us?”

If it’s even possible, Niall tenses more. Zayn slides a hand into Niall’s hair and tugs gently. “Are you ever scared you’ll have to kill me?”

It’s a long while before Niall responds, and when he does, it’s in the form of a joke that falls flat, a stilted, “Think Lou’s got the monopoly on putting you out of your misery.”

“If you had to, though,” Zayn presses, and he doesn’t - he doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to think about the consequences of a bite, of what he’ll have to do to them if it ever happens, but. 

But they can’t ignore it anymore.

“Would you kill _me_?” Niall asks. His words come out a pitch too-high, dry and cracking, and Zayn kisses the space beneath his ear. 

“I wouldn’t let you die,” Zayn tells him, and it’s as fierce as he’s ever said anything. “You have no idea what I’d - Niall, I’d do anything to keep you safe, swear.”

Niall laughs, and it sounds broken. “You can’t do that. You can’t ask me that and then give a roundabout answer yourself, what the fuck?”

“You don’t get it. Jesus, I’d take a _bite_ for you at this point.” Niall’s palms are flat at the small of his back, and he focuses on that when he closes his eyes and adds, “Only way I’m ever going out is if I’m taken down, and I just want to know if you’d do it.”

It takes a moment, but then Niall lifts his head, and he isn’t frowning, but he isn’t smiling, either. “Are you -” he pauses, and looks down at what little space exists between their bodies. “You’re not asking if I _can_ kill you, you’re asking if I will.”

“ _Ding ding ding_ ,” Zayn murmurs. “Tell the man what he’s won.”

"You want me to shoot you in the head if a zombie bites you," Niall says, careful, almost to himself, and Zayn cups his face, looks him straight in the eye because he wants this to be clear.

"Lou's always told me he'd do it, if I got bit, but..." Zayn swallows and shakes his head again. "I know him. I know everything about him, and I know," he closes his eyes briefly to collect himself, and finishes:

"He'd put a bullet through his own head before he'd ever do that to me."

Niall looks close to punching him. "And you think that'd be _easy_ for me?"

"No," Zayn says. "I think you'd still be able to keep the good parts of yourself, after."

Niall's eyes are devastatingly bright as he nods and scoots away. "Right," he sniffs, and Zayn watches him, watches his shoulders straighten and his jaw go tight.

Watches him fold his ring and pinky finger into his palm and slowly point his index and middle to the space between Zayn's eyes, thumb straight. Like a gun cocked and ready. 

"Any last words?" he asks, grim and unsmiling, and when Zayn speaks, it's as easy and unthinking as taking his next breath:

"I love you."

Niall's chin trembles in the next moment, and he presses his lips together, replaces the finger-gun with his forehead. He drops his hand instead to Zayn's neck, thumb digging in under Zayn's jaw, feeling for the fluttering pulse Zayn's heart pumps out.

Zayn shakes his head, holds onto Niall's nape and says, "If this is the last day we're ever gonna feel safe for awhile, I just wanted - I wanted," he inhales, gets as close to Niall as he can. "I wanted to tell you that."

“Stop.”

"No, I wanted to say it in case -"

"Zayn, shut the fuck up," Niall says on a shaking breath out, but Zayn can't, he _won't_ -

"I’m not going to wait until we’re dying to tell you I -"

Niall kisses him, hard enough to hurt, traps Zayn's confession in his mouth and lets the words lie there, half-dead but hopeful. Zayn parts his lips and wonders if Niall can taste the absolute truth of it on his tongue, anyway.

"Don't, okay?" Niall says when they break away, and Zayn ducks his head to Niall’s shoulder instead. He combs a shaking hand through Zayn's hair. "Just. It's hard enough. Don't make it worse."

Zayn swallows down fire in his throat, swallows down what he really wants to say. He's so close to crying.

So he starts talking instead.

"We're gonna make it out of the city." He rests his palms at Niall's waist under his tank, fingers fitted between the slats of his ribs. "Go south where it's warm, all the time. And we'll find, like, a cottage or something - a bungalow. Or a cabin by a lake. And we'll make a home there. A real home."

His lashes are wet where his face is hidden at the curve of Niall's neck and shoulder. They both know it's all just words - a fairy tale sort of ending they can’t even dream about now.

"None of us -" Zayn is so afraid to breathe; the air leaves his lungs in an erratic gust out and Niall's lips brush his temple. "None of us will ever get bit. And we'll be happy and I'll stop -" his chest hitches, and they're close enough for Niall to feel it.

Zayn laughs, and lets hot tears spill onto Niall's clavicle, jutting out far too much.

"I'll stop wishing I met you earlier."

Niall nudges him under the chin, but when Zayn lifts his head, Niall isn't looking at him. His eyes are locked somewhere on the ground, hundreds of feet below them, surveying the damage and the danger.

"So," his voice shakes, and he clears his throat and glances at Zayn. Tries again, tone dull and disbelieving. "So happily ever after, yeah?"

Zayn tips their foreheads together and nods. He wishes it wasn't a lie. "That's the plan."

The pads of Niall's fingers skate across his bottom lip. His mouth follows after, barely there. "You don't really think that," he murmurs. "That it'll all work out. Wouldn't ask me to be the one to pull the trigger if you did."

There’s a pause, and then another. 

“No,” Zayn agrees. “I don't."

Niall kisses him then, swallows down Zayn's _But I have you. I have them._

_And maybe that's enough._

*

There's no sense of urgency, no creeping sort of desperation infused into their last night in this hotel, only lingering touches that are meant to make the moment last. Zayn tries to savor everything with as much detail as he can: the scratch of the hotel sheets from where he’s lying half on his stomach, the edge of a pillow clutched in his fist, the weight of Niall’s chest plastered to his back, holding him down, holding him _in_ , every movement _slowslowslow_ , a dragging burn that wrecks something in Zayn, cracks his heart like a fracture that won’t ever set right again.

He comes with a calloused palm on his hip and a damaged knee shoving his thighs apart, with Niall’s teeth at his shoulder, staking claim, and it’s a bite mark that is just as lethal as a monster’s - but infinitely more worth the cataclysmic death it’ll cause someday. 

It’s still dark out, when they finally start to drift off to sleep. Niall lethargically curls up behind Zayn, arm slung across his waist, palm spread at his sternum over the steady, lulling drumbeat in Zayn’s chest. And when he noses along the stretch of thin skin under Zayn’s ear and speaks for the first time since the left they rooftop, it’s to breathe out a low, aching _I love you too_. 

(It strikes Zayn, then, that reciprocation has never hurt this well.)

*

They head up to the roof again hours later, joined by Harry, Liam and Louis, this time. It’s nearly morning, and the five of them sit at the edge of the building to watch the sunrise. Zayn’s got Niall on one side with his cheek on Zayn’s shoulder, Louis on the other; Liam with a leg hooked over Niall’s good knee and Harry curled up sleepily in his lap. 

“Time are we leaving?” Harry murmurs, and Liam hums something under his breath as he walks his fingers up Harry’s arm.

“Few hours. We’ve got everything ready by the front entrance.”

“Haven’t been out of this city since this whole thing started,” Louis says. “It’ll be weird leaving it.”

“Ah, but I bet you’re glad you’re leaving with us,” Niall says with a smile. 

“Yeah.” Louis glances at Zayn, mouth lilting up at the ends. “We are.”

There’s a lull, and then Liam takes a breath and says, “I think we would’ve been friends. Before.”

Louis lifts a brow. "Yeah?"

Liam nods, and Louis looks at him for a few, spare moments and then leans over Zayn and Niall’s laps into Liam's space, brushes the hair off his forehead and tips his face up to study him with hands under his jaw. 

"I would've ruined you," he says eventually, and Liam's eyes flicker between Louis'. A slow smile pulls at his mouth and he huffs out a laugh that Louis returns just before he sags against Zayn again.

"Probably could've gotten him to break a lot more laws," Niall agrees, and Zayn doesn’t know if Liam’s right, exactly. Maybe they _wouldn’t_ have been friends. 

Maybe they’d’ve never even met if it hadn’t been for this. 

They’re friends _now_ , though, and Zayn thinks it doesn’t matter if he’s at the hotel or the pier or fucking Timbuktu - he’s got something here, they all do, and there is no place like home anymore because there aren’t any left, but there are people who feel like it, and he’d forgotten what that was like beyond the scope of Louis. 

The sky paints itself anew with swaths of pinks and oranges and magentas when Niall finally picks his head up to look at Zayn. His mouth twitches up at one end in the silence on this rooftop, in the din of the horror on the streets below. It’s muted, but genuine. 

Like this happiness is more than okay, even though it’s come at the wrong end of their story.

Zayn can’t do anything but kiss him - it’s a feather-light touch, more about the intent than the actual press of lips - and there's this beat of relief where the burden of humanity seems to weigh a little less heavily on their shoulders. Niall breaks away for a breath, cups Zayn's jaw with calloused fingers and dives in to kiss him back, wholly. 

His hand flies up to curl around Niall's wrist, and Louis wolf-whistles softly. Harry and Liam give twin exhales of tired, hushed laughter in response, and Zayn knows. He knows a world without this makeshift family in it is not a world worth anything. 

So he'll survive. And they'll fight. Not for the world, not for a _cure_ \- but for each other.

Fight for the family they lost and the one they found. For the memories of the past (of cold beer and birthdays and games of Life that didn't involve washing someone else's blood off their hands) and the ones they haven’t yet made. For the predictability of time on an endlessly revolving planet that isn't quite as dead as Zayn thought it was, if only because these four people inhabit it.

("Told you," Niall says when they part again, soft and sweet. "Earth always keeps on turning. No different from any other day.")

They’ll fight for a tomorrow where they can all be together, because the world is _lit on fire now, always_ , but Zayn is so fucking willing to let himself get burned as long as it means the five of them can have limitless mornings just like this one - mornings they aren't supposed to have but take anyway, because they are human and they are selfish and they deserve to survive the grim finality of an apocalypse with nothing but love and a handful of weapons to call their own.

Niall's pulse _sings_ under the press of Zayn’s touch, a frenetic thrum like a bass drum beneath his skin, and Zayn wants him _forever_ , however relative that term is these days. He holds tight to the delicate bones of Niall’s wrist and watches a smile meant for only him spread slow and steady, as bright and warm and beautifully enduring as the sun rising over the ruined city that surrounds them.

Zayn's never seen a better reason to keep his heart beating.


End file.
